Inland Northwest Opera's 'La Traviata' trades Paris for 1920s Hollywood

Sep. 8—Returning to the Martin Woldson Theater at the Fox to close its 2022 season, Inland Northwest Opera's production of "La Traviata" will bring Giuseppe Verdi's tragic tale forward nearly a century to Hollywood and the tail end of the roaring '20s.

The classic tale will tell the story of starlet Violetta (Raquel González), who lives a carefully crafted life. When Alfredo (Andrew Stenson) falls for her, his family pulls strings to preserve the family honor, and tragedy prevails.

Sung in Italian with English supertitles, "La Traviata" begins at the Fox on Friday at 7:30 p.m. and Sunday at 3 p.m. Artistic director Dan Wallace Miller will host a preshow discussion one hour before each performance. All patrons are welcome to attend.

Leaning into the aesthetic of the Fox, Miller chose to set the production in 1928.

"This was a very pivotal time in the world of film," Miller said. Talking pictures had just made their debut the year before and, "a whole generation of huge stars just completely ceased to exist."

It was also just a few years before Hollywood started to censor itself with the Hays Code, which set industry guidelines for content. So at the time, film culture was "viewed as this utterly hedonistic kind of bastion of excess and opulence."

While working on the production, Miller took inspiration from the life of Louise Brooks. Her career was relatively short-lived, stretching between the early 1920s and '30s. Best-known for playing Lulu in the 1929 German silent film "Pandora's Box," Brooks' iconic bob haircut stayed around long after her retirement.

"She was this very unique personality," Miller said. "Very much like Violetta, she lived life on her own terms and had this very cosmopolitan attitude — she wasn't afraid to say what she thought."

Brooks eventually left Hollywood entirely because "the culture of it totally disgusted her" and she considered herself "too degenerate for one part of Hollywood and not degenerate enough for the other," Miller said.

The original story is tragic enough on its own. Moving from the Parisian "demimonde" — a concept more or less foreign to modern audiences — and into the early days of Hollywood "gives a little more emotional resonance to the story," he said.

Instead of a courtesan, Violetta becomes a fading starlet. She's terminally ill, but can't say anything in public for fear of losing marketability. And in the midst of a sea of backstabbing rivals, looking for any chance to jump ahead, Violetta stumbles upon Alfredo, a tourist from the countryside, visiting the city for the first time.

"This complete outsider — gets invited to the party as a joke," Miller said. "All of her society friends think it would be funny to bring this normal guy, this ardent fan, to a Hollywood party and make fun of him for how in love he has become with Violetta's public image."

From there, the central question of the original story unfolds, should Violetta subsume herself in "a life of completely vapid, empty pleasure and hedonism, or ... try to chase something she's never had ... genuine human connection," Miller said.

"There are plenty of directors who'll come up with a clever idea, where typically ... for every question you answer, it brings up five to 10 more questions," Stenson said, explaining how the new setting gave him more perspective while approaching the role of Alfredo. "But Dan has such a great way of making sure that all the loose ends are tied up effectively ... making it make so much sense that by the end of it, you're like, 'Oh, man, I can't believe I didn't see it that way before.' "