No one in town knows, but Amina walks in her dreams.
When she is found asleep in the count's room, where he has taken her sleepwalking, they think that she has been unfaithful to her fiancée.
It doesn't matter if she denies it a thousand times.
He disowns her and announces that he will marry another of hers.
Then they see her sleepwalking.
And now yes.
Now they believe her and the happy ending is rushed.
The town wants her again, he rectifies and they get married.
They marry?
“Over my dead body!” Bárbara Lluch is indignant.
La Sonnambula
, which will be in Madrid from December 15 to January 6, is her debut as a stage director at the Teatro Real in Madrid.
The happy ending was written by Vincenzo Bellini in the 19th century, but we are in the 21st, and the fact that Amina decides to marry the man who humiliates her grates on Lluch.
She was very clear about it from the beginning.
“I can't show a woman marrying her fiancée after what she's been through,” she says, sitting in the same rehearsal room where Maurizio Benini, the music director, heard about the final twist.
“He was giving notes and I: 'No, no.'
And in the end I raised my hand and said: 'It's just that they don't get married.'
One then imagines a big “What?”, confused looks, long faces and an uncomfortable silence.
What is not dramatization, because Lluch herself tells it, is that the director then interrupted the rehearsal and asked all the singers to leave the room: “People left like: 'Oops!'.
We were left alone and talked for two hours and ten minutes.”
The soprano, in a rehearsal of 'La sonnambula' at the Teatro Real surrounded by members of the choir and dancers. Javier del Real (ROYAL THEATER)
In the end they found a way to solve it.
“I have had to agree with everyone, including the Pope in Rome,” he says.
In that same room he receives EL PAÍS, during a break from the first rehearsal of the choir and the singers together.
He wears a short-sleeved shirt that he rolls up the sleeves all the time to his shoulders, as if he wanted to reduce his body temperature by some degree.
His feet, however, are covered with what appear to be padded-soled snow boots.
Lluch observes and grazes.
She rushes to a choir member, grabs his arm, and leads him to the other end of the room.
He advances this singer a few steps, the other he moves to the right.
And while he goes from here to there, checking that each sheep is in his place, his booties make the noise that slippers would make dragging across the parquet floor at home.
The sopranos, he says, received his idea for the ending very well.
Somewhat more reticent the tenors.
She knows that now she has the public and she is psyched.
“They have never booed me because I have directed little and I have not had bad luck, but I am quite prepared for there to be a sector that does not like it.
A stage director must make a reading that is interesting for the viewer today, even if he boos you.
But let it come to him, touch him ”.
Bárbara Lluch, during one of the rehearsals for 'La Sonnambula' at the Teatro Real.
Luis Sevillano
Before getting fully involved in opera, Lluch tried it with interpretation: “I don't remember them as happy times, not even when I was on stage.
And above all the shadow of my grandmother.
You inherit friends and enemies.
I admit that they gave me roles because of who I was, but they also treated me horribly on other occasions.
They did not send you the text and you arrived unprepared, for example”.
He remembers that his grandmother, the actress Núria Espert, used to repeat a phrase to him: "Hollywood is paved with the hearts of the actors' children."
Until the opera found Lluch.
They asked her to translate for a couple of directors at the Teatro Real and, suddenly, an assistant to the stage director was absent from her and they proposed to her to fill the position.
“I fell in love from day one.
All my attributes, which in the world of acting were defects, are not here.
Years passed and he went to London.
“It was a joy.
Nobody knew who I was, ”she explains.
She has been an assistant stage manager for over a decade at Covent Garden and already immersed in the sector she realized a deep gap.
“The proof that something is happening is that 50% of the people who work as assistants are women and then they don't take the next step: to management.
There are very few women.
Why?
I do not know.
It's not for lack of talent."
His experience as an assistant has been bitter at times because, he points out, it is still a man's world.
“They speak above, they treat you as if you were a girl.
My feeling is that I, being a woman, take longer than any man to be taken seriously.
Not now, but it has happened to me millions of times that at first it's like 'How cute is the girl who is directing the opera'.
They interrupt me, they talk to each other… Suddenly you have to punch the table, which is not my character at all”.
He says that it doesn't only happen to her, but also to her friends who are dedicated to stage direction.
And that many of them have even been forced to change their way of dressing to be respected.
It has happened to her, although only on occasion: “When I was an assistant, according to the director I worked with, I didn't wear skirts or pick up my hair.
None of this has happened to him in front of the stage direction of
La Sonnabula
at the Real.
She confesses that she did not expect to feel so supported, that in this theater she feels incredibly well.
"Because you deserve it!", blurts out a spontaneous that swarms through the room, since in a few minutes the rehearsal begins.
From the end, Lluch refuses to say anything else.
Only that, that Amina is not getting married.
She will have to go to the theater to see how she has solved it.
The stage director Bárbara Lluch at the Teatro Real.Luis Sevillano
Data sheet
Amina
: Nadine Sierra (Dec 15, 18, 23, 26, 29; Jan 2, 4), Jessica Pratt (Dec 16, 19, 27, 30; Jan 3, 6)
Elvino:
Xabier Anduaga (15, 18, 23, 26, 29 Dec; 2, 4 Jan), Francesco Demuro (16, 19, 27, 30 Dec; 3, 6 Jan)
Count Rodolfo:
Roberto Tagliavini (15, 18, 23, 26, 29 Dec; 2, 4 Jan), Fernando Radó (16, 19, 27, 30 Dec; 3, 6 Jan)
Lisa
: Rocío Pérez (15, 18, 23, 26, 29 Dec; 2, 4 Jan), Serena Sáenz (16, 19, 27, 30 Dec; 3, 6 Jan)
Teresa
: Monica Bacelli (Dec 15, 18, 23, 26, 29; Jan 2, 4), Gemma Coma-Alabert (Dec 16, 19, 27, 30; Jan 3, 6)
Alessio
: Isaac Galan
Notary
: Gerardo López
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