Director Richard Eyre on Making the Met's Le Nozze di Figaro Sexier & Conjuring Ghosts in the States

As the familiar strain of the Le Nozze di Figaro overture soars through the Metropolitan Opera House, you won't find any stuffy 18th-century costumes or powdered wigs. In Sir Richard Eyre’s new staging of the Mozart classic, the lights come up on an unexpected visual: a maid, post-tryst, naked from the waist up. Yes, sex sells—even in the opera world—but as the Olivier Award-winning director explains to Broadway.com, staging an opera that's all about sex requires more than showing some skin.

“It’s all in performance,” the director says. “It’s just getting a group of singers prepared to be uninhibited and prepared to pay attention to the detail of the acting and the feelings, just as they do to the music.” It’s a challenge that not all singers may immediately recognize, but Eyre insists, “You have to pay equal attention to the performance as to the music. It doesn’t make sense to me to have an order of priorities.”

That responsibility of balance also lies with the conductor, Met Music Director James Levine. “Sometimes with opera—I’ve never experienced this—but people complain of the conductor pulling rank,” Eyre says. “[Levine] doesn’t behave that way at all. The two of us are engaged in making music theater.” 

Eyre has staged two productions playing the Met this fall: Figaro, which opened the season on September 22, and his repertory production of Carmen, which premiered in 2009. Both are set in the late 1920s and early ‘30s in Seville. “It’s close enough to contemporary costume that people are able to identify with the characters in a much more accessible way,” Eyre reasons. And if you're still not an opera fan? “I pity you,” the director says with a laugh. “You are depriving yourself of a really great experience.” But until directing La Traviata at the Royal Opera House in 1994, even Eyre considered himself an opera skeptic.

Lincoln Center may be just north of the Theater District, but if given the opportunity, Eyre would mount an English-language The Marriage of Figaro on the Great White Way—an adaptation “more in the idiom of musical theater.” Eyre also revealed that his Olivier-winning production of Ibsen’s Ghosts, which played London’s Almeida Theatre and West End’s Trafalgar Studios, will make its New York premiere at Brooklyn Academy of Music in April.

Until then, audiences can catch eight remaining performances of the very sexy Le Nozze di Figaro at the Metropolitan Opera through December 20 and Carmen through March 7.