Behind the Scenes with NYU’s Ambitious ‘Die Fledermaus’ Set in Gilded Age New York

In the 1874 comic opera Die Fledermaus, mistaken identities and a misjudged practical joke are resolved during a lavish New Year’s Eve party, where party-goers flirt, champagne flows, and everyone ends up in jail.

There’s little that’s serious in the plot of the Johann Strauss operetta, but presenting its full-on frivolity can be a heavy lift. For months this semester, more than 70 undergraduate and graduate singers, musicians, and technicians in NYU Steinhardt’s Music and Performing Arts Professions department have been working on this ambitious production, one of the most elaborate the department has ever attempted.

Steinhardt’s Die Fledermaus will be performed four times between April 11 and 13 in the Iris Cantor Theatre in the John A. Paulson Center. Adjunct Faculty in Vocal Performance A. Scott Parry directs, using a script he adapted that moves the setting from Vienna to New York City. Joshua Rosenblum, adjunct faculty in Screen Scoring, is the music director. Rented scenery and costumes from professional opera companies create its Gilded Age grandeur and showcase the talents of the student artists.

NYU News spoke with Parry about the logistics of coordinating two casts, a full orchestra, and technical crew as the group prepared to move from the rehearsal room to the stage. He also spoke about the educational value of live performance and made a case for opera’s continued relevance.

Why did you decide to adapt the opera’s libretto to English and set it in New York City?

It was originally a libretto that was written in French, then translated into German for Strauss to compose for the Viennese public. It's meant to be a period piece, and you can hear that in the "old-fashioned" waltz music that pervades it. So I wondered, how can this resonate best for our audience here and now? This requires one to lean into the vernacular of a specific time and place where this sort of music can make sense. I set it in New York City, at the turn of the 20th century at the Waldorf-Astoria, to give it a locally specific context that still has a kind of "waltz" perfume around it. The piece is very tongue-in-cheek, overtly comic and effervescent. There’s a lot of champagne, and partying abounds. The cast has been researching the period by watching HBO's The Gilded Age. That’s the general atmosphere here—an elevated high-society group having fancy parties and celebrating themselves and their forward-looking modernity.

Describe the educational value of participating in this splashy production. How is it different from classroom and voice studio settings?

Students are required to audition and to participate in some kind of production over the course of their performance degree studies. They are not getting academic credit for the show per se, but they are exposed to the experience of the full process, the building of it bit by bit, through each of the individual elements. By performing onstage or being part of the tech crew, they learn how opera functions, how it works from the inside. It’s the practicum of their academic work, their boots-on-the-ground moment. It’s imperative for students to have this kind of hands-on experience. Studying is essential—you are diligently learning the craft. But it’s not just the training of the voice or learning theatre history or taking acting class. You have to learn to fully communicate with an audience, and the only way to do that is to actually be onstage, under the lights, projecting over an orchestra, with a whole mess of people sitting there in front of you. That’s ultimately what it’s all about. That moment in the spotlight in front of an audience who is wanting to connect to the character you’re portraying. This is where the rubber meets the road.

You describe the preparation in layers. Can you walk us through the rehearsal process?

We invest about six months on a production like this. After auditions and casting, we distribute the script and score for everyone to work on individually. We first come together and sing and read through the entire piece, making notes as to what everyone brings in terms of their own research and preparation, and we have musical rehearsals to give unity to all the musical aspects. Next, we have staging rehearsals, with the music director and a rehearsal pianist rather than the orchestra, where we define characters and relationships and how people move and interact. The orchestra rehearses on its own with the conductor. Then we run the whole piece through with note sessions for both music and staging.

Then we have orchestra rehearsals for the music director to coordinate with the performers onstage and the musicians in the pit to determine how everything will be phrased and what tempos will be taken. Outside the rehearsal room, we have design meetings, costume and wig fittings, and lighting instruments getting hung, focused, and cued. After the set arrives and is loaded into the theatre, we rehearse onstage with the actual furniture and props and all the technical elements, and then add costumes and the orchestra for what we call final dress rehearsals for each of the casts. It’s everything all together all at once.

You are performing in the Iris Cantor Theatre, the university’s new state-of-the-art venue. How does this enhance student experience?