Houstonian Tara Faircloth had no intentions of wintering in Arizona, but for the past three months, she has done just that.
She arrived here in December to direct Arizona Opera’s production of Bizet’s “Carmen” and was expecting to be back home in Texas right after the show wrapped in Phoenix in early February.
But in mid-December, Faircloth got a phone call from Arizona Opera Executive Director Ryan Taylor. Seems the director booked a year ago for “Don Giovanni” had to pull out. Would she mind taking over?
“When he first asked me I said, ‘No’. It’s a huge opera. It’s a monument in the repertory and I want to be well prepared,” she explained. “But he said all the right things to me. Ultimately I realized I work with a lot of young artists at the Houston Grand Opera and every day I go into coaching and I may or may not know what we are going to be rehearsing before I arrive. But … we work together and we make amazing magic together. I kind of decided I would lean on my skills I’ve learned over the years. As a performing artist I think we have this idea that we can control a lot of things, and that’s not what art is about. It’s about discovery.”
As she is speaking it begins to sound like Faircloth is still trying to convince herself that sticking around for “Don Giovanni,” which played in Phoenix last weekend and comes to Tucson Music Hall this weekend, was such a good idea.
“I know parts of ‘Don Giovanni’ really well, but I don’t know the whole opera really well. I had never directed it before,” she said. “But I love Arizona Opera and I wanted to make sure they were well taken care of. So here I am.”
Faircloth inherited the production, which she described as a fairly traditional take on “Giovanni” — Mozart’s opera buffa centered on the fictional lady’s man Don Juan.
But “I was able to make my mark on some elements of the set just working with the pieces we had in place but working with them in a different way,” she said.
The production has six characters, all of them double-cast, which means that no two productions are alike, she added.
“As a lady director, I spend a lot of time thinking about my ladies in the operas and I feel these lady characters are pretty well developed, and some of them in ways that I have not seen before on stage,” she said. “So I am kind of excited about that.”
