Entertainment
After 34 years, David Hockney’s magnificent ‘Turandot’ sets get resurrected in L.A.
When the curtain rises Saturday evening on Los Angeles Opera’s “Turandot,” composer Giacomo Puccini’s last work will feature the L.A. debut of the production’s biggest star: monumental stage sets designed in the early 1990s by David Hockney, the renowned British painter and celebrated chronicler of Southern California life.
Bathed in deeply saturated red and ultramarine, the swooping curves and dagger-like angles of Hockney’s “Turandot” sets are the backdrop for the grim fairy tale about a cold-blooded Chinese princess who has her would-be suitors beheaded — until one of them melts her heart.
Hockney’s scenic design, reminiscent of stark German Expressionist filmmaking with a dash of the backgrounds in Walt Disney’s “Fantasia,” is a virtuosic testament to the artist’s lifelong exploration of abstract figurative painting and his abiding love of opera.
“We’ve been trying to program Hockney’s ‘Turandot’ for 30 years,” said Rupert Hemmings, vice president of artistic planning for L.A. Opera, which commissioned Hockney sets for the operas “Tristan and Isolde” and “Die Frau Ohne Schatten.” “The task is always to create something that audiences come for. It could be the soprano or the director. Here, it’s Hockney, who created a visionary work of art that the opera happens within.”
The cast of “Turandot” runs through final rehearsals Monday of the David Hockney production of “Turandot” at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion.
(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)
Among the grandest of grand operas, “Turandot” is a demanding enterprise.
“There are 342 people in the cast and crew, 95% of whom are union,” Hemmings said. “To work with an 86-piece orchestra and to cast, clothe, rehearse, corral and pay 128 performers is expensive, and to protect their voices, we can only play twice a week.” With a seating capacity of 3,100 for each of six performances at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, he added, “it won’t even be break-even.”
In addition to the cost of personnel, L.A. Opera has spent $80,000 to rent the production assets — the props, Hockney’s sets and costumes by Ian Falconer, the writer and illustrator of the popular “Olivia” series of children’s books — from the San Francisco Opera and the Lyric Opera of Chicago, which commissioned the “Turandot” designs 34 years ago.
Having created opera sets since 1975, including 18 months of work on L.A. Opera’s “Tristan and Isolde” in 1987, Hockney took on the “Turandot” commission with fierce opinions. In his 1993 autobiography, “That’s the Way I See It,” he wrote, “I had seen many productions of ’Turandot,’ most of them kitsch beyond belief, overdone Chinoiserie, and too many dragons. … For the first scene, the city of Peking, I suggested that we take the dragons away and put them into the roofs, in forms that felt like dragons.” The result is a strikingly fantastical depiction of the city now known as Beijing, using, Hockney added, “harsh edges, strong diagonals, mad perspectives.”
According to Drew Landmesser, former deputy general director of the Lyric Opera of Chicago, Hockney — who moved to Los Angeles in 1964 — transformed a tennis court on his Hollywood Hills property into a work studio. Unlike other designers, who typically create set models at a scale of a quarter-inch or half-inch per foot, Hockney built a “ginormous platform with models so large that he could crawl around them to explore the space and how people would move in it.”
Workers move giant “Turandot” set pieces backstage for the second act during a rehearsal.
(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)
The artist also installed his own lighting system to ensure accurate representation of the intense colors he chose for his set pieces, which include red exterior facades that soar to 30 feet and a scrim accented with jade green and royal blue painted on seamless canvas that stretches 60 feet across the stage.
After two years of development, translating measurements for construction of the “Turandot” sets took six weeks of computer work. The sets, props and costumes cost around $1 million to produce, said Landmesser, a “not disproportionately large investment” shared by the Chicago and San Francisco companies and amortized through rentals. (That production figure does not include fees paid to the creative team, including Hockney, costume designer Falconer and the lighting and stage directors.) Since 1992, the sets have been used more than a dozen times across the U.S. and in Naples, Italy.
During a visit to rehearsals last week — as lead tenor and artist-in-residence Russell Thomas repeatedly banged an enormous gong, signifying the end of Act 1 — Hemmings and L.A. Opera technical director Jeff Kleeman described the labor-intensive process of mounting the show.
“The level of detail to produce and resource it properly takes months and months of analysis,” said Kleeman, who pores over renderings made with computer-aided design software to adapt Hockney’s design for the L.A. Opera stage and establish placement of scenic elements and lighting in what is known as a composite ground plan.
“Act by act, piece by piece, we make it fit,” he said.
The sets, which San Francisco Opera pays to store in a warehouse in Modesto, were broken down into “thousands of pieces and fit together like Tetris to reduce damage and fit into three 53-foot trailer trucks with eight-foot ceilings,” Kleeman said. Upon the sets’ arrival in L.A., his 64-strong stage crew spent five 10-hour days in three teams, sorting the pieces for each act of the opera, assembling them, making necessary repairs and positioning some 800 lights.
‘Turandot’: What to know
Three quick points about Puccini’s last opera
“The sets are what we call soft walls,” Kleeman noted, “made from wood with fabric coverings. These days, sets are constructed with steel and plywood, which are heavier and more durable. Soft walls weigh less and are cheaper to build, but after a couple of uses and trips in the truck, they tend to get worn.” Enter the scenic painters, who custom-blend and color-match Hockney’s highly saturated hues to touch up the sets and create a board lined with pieces of painted tape for quick patches before or during a performance.
Intermissions in the show last 20 to 25 minutes, to allow the 43 members of the wardrobe, wig and makeup crew to prepare performers for the next act and the stage crew to roll pre-built sets into position. About one-third of the scenery is “gripped,” Kleeman said, meaning pieces are carried onstage and assembled by carpenters. “It sounds chaotic,” he added with a smile. “Everything needs to be placed exactly where it should be, in a highly choreographed way, and with each rehearsal we refine the approach. So as big as it all seems, it becomes a routine.”
Workers move pieces of a roof during a set change.
(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)
Technical director Jeff Kleeman during rehearsal in the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion.
(Jason Armond/Los Angeles Times)
The towering sets are more than just spectacle, senior design manager Carolina Angulo said. “The use of forced perspective and oversize proportions unconsciously leads the audience to think about the characters’ place in this world and to feel their emotions.”
In presenting the San Francisco Opera Medal to Hockney in 2017, General Director Matthew Shilvock cited the artist for his impact on the art form.
“His productions are bold expressions of archetypal emotions, deeply rooted in a strong sense of spatial resonance and scale,” Shilvock said. “He finds rhythm in color and design and creates portals that we enter with thrilling excitement.”
Hemmings concurred, calling Hockney’s “Turandot” a provocative conceptual design that remains timeless.
“A lot of opera sets last for more than 30 years,” he noted. “If this ‘Turandot’ got to the point of it being worn out, someone would rebuild it. You would never get rid of it. That would be like throwing a David Hockney painting away.”
A “Turandot” set piece has hand-written notations about which act it’s for.
(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)
‘Turandot’
When: 7:30 p.m. Saturday , 2 p.m. May 26, 7:30 p.m. May 30, 2 p.m. June 2, 7:30 p.m. June 5 and 8
Where: Dorothy Chandler Pavilion 135 N. Grand Ave., L.A.
Tickets: $34 and up
Information: (213) 972-8001, LAOpera.org
Running time: 2 hours and 55 minutes (including two intermissions)
Memories of cinema past and present come rushing at you like 2001’s Star Gate sequence in Nicolas Winding Refn’s Her Private Hell, his first return to cinema since 2016’s Neon Demon and his first project since dying for 20 minutes from a serious heart condition three years ago. Somehow, it was excluded from the Cannes Film Festival’s official competition in favor of films that look very much like 20th-century television, but so far Refn’s film is the only suggestion at this year’s event that one of its key directors is even remotely curious as to what the real future of film might look like — as opposed to a mess of known IP and AI recreations of people who’ve been dead for 50 years. It seems the French, who once disdained le cinema du papa, have a little bit of catching-up to do.
The film it most closely corresponds to is last year’s Resurrection by China’s Bi Gan, another awake-dream that aims to haunt rather than entertain (although the two things are by no means mutually exclusive). In terms of art, it brings to mind ballet, since so much of what’s important in that medium is hardly what you’d call storytelling in the Hollywood narrative sense. To expand on that further, it would be impossible to discuss the power of this film without mentioning Pino Donaggio’s phenomenal score. Bringing much-needed context to Refn’s style-overload, Donaggio’s achingly emotional soundtrack guides the film in a way music hasn’t since the early silents, or the heyday of Powell & Pressburger, and even, at a push, the experimental films of Kenneth Anger.
What’s it about? Whatever you like. The setting is a surreal futuristic Japanese city of the most unrealistic high-rise kind, and at the story’s core is Elle (Sophie Thatcher), who is about to make a film with a younger influencer type named Hunter (Kristine Froseth). Hunter is obsessed with fame and obsessed with Elle, and the whole film draws quite heavily, in a similarly symbiotic way (whether knowingly or not), on Ingmar Bergman’s 1966 psychodrama Persona, which no genre director ever has ever not found endlessly fascinating. As they prepare for the shoot, Hunter meets Dominique (Havana Rose Liu), Elle’s former lover and now her father’s new wife. It’s a complication that obviously hurts, but Hunter is either slow on the uptake or, more likely, couldn’t really care less.
If we’re going to apply film-school formalism to a film that intends to live rent-free in your imagination whether you want it there or not, the “inciting incident” that the girls see a murder in a nearby tower block, and a young woman is defenestrated. It corresponds to the myth of The Leather Man, a tormented, Orpheus-like demon with piercing red eyes and razor-sharp diamond-studded gloves who stalks and kills young women in a bid to replace the daughter he lost to the underworld. We then jump-cut to a scene from a breathlessly exciting space movie, with Elle starring as the leader of an female sci-fi movie that looks like a fantastic space-opera version of Tarantino’s Fox Force Five and which serves as a reminder of Refn’s past interest in remaking Barbarella.
Things get more puzzling and more interesting — depending, of course, on your tolerance for ambiguity — with the arrival of Private K (Charles Melton), an American GI on the trail of The Leather Man, avenging mistreated women wherever he sees them, and drawn like a moth to the dress shop where he used to shop for his now-missing daughter. Private K isn’t at all connected to the main story, but as in Refn’s Thailand-set horror-thriller Only God Forgives, there is a sense that, somehow, justice can be willed into life in the east, and there is a sense that — perhaps — Elle has somehow summoned Private K into being, as the father she will never have.
How does it all fit together? Well, it does and it doesn’t, and Refn leaves you alone to figure out the true significance of The Leather Man and his two fabulously gnomic assistants (Ms. S and Ms. T). The genius of Her Private Hell is that, like a kind of visual ASMR, it offers nothing really concrete, just a lot of satisfying triggers and sensory associations. The actors feel that energy too, and the performances almost dare you to follow them, experimenting wildly with their characters in ways that make only the most subliminal kind of sense.
Is it pretentious? You bet! But it’s the kind of pretension that’s been missing for far too long in cinema; where once critics used to applaud Luis Bunuel for casting two actresses as the same character in 1977’s That Obscure Object of Desire, now they castigate Christopher Nolan for putting Elliott Page in The Odyssey.
Her Private Hell is either for you or it isn’t and you’re either for it or you aren’t. Either way, this is a film that demands you pick a side.
Title: Her Private Hell
Festival: Cannes (Out of Competition)
Director: Nicolas Winding Refn
Screenwriter: Nicolas Winding Refn, Esti Giordani
Cast: Sophie Thatcher, Havana Rose Liu, Kristine Froseth, Charles Melton
Distributor: Neon
Running time: 1 hrs 49 mins
It’s a tight three-way race at the top, with a second helping of “Beef,” which won eight Emmys for its first serving, barely ahead of Richard Gadd’s “Baby Reindeer” follow-up, and a suburban noir with abundant heart from Steven Conrad, the maker of “Patriot.”
Glenn Whipp says, “ ‘DTF St. Louis’ is the standout limited series, a murder mystery in form that’s really about suburban loneliness, particularly the isolation that can cripple middle-aged men.”
While Lorraine Ali calls “Half Man” “the series to watch in this race,” not all of her Buzzy buddies are as enthusiastic: “I fear that ‘Half Man,’ Richard Gadd’s aggressively unpleasant follow-up to ‘Baby Reindeer,’ will get a knee-jerk nomination here,” says Kristen Baldwin, “but that vote would be better spent on PBS’ superb adaptation of ‘The Count of Monte Cristo’ or Riz Ahmed’s ‘Bait.’ ”
Tracy Brown says, “Recent trends suggest this race might come down to voters’ appetites for bleak British miniseries” such as “Half Man,” but “ ‘Adolescence’ co-creator Jack Thorne’s ‘Lord of the Flies’ adaptation was a bit more in my lane so I’ll give it the edge.”
The twice-cooked “Beef” isn’t to all the panelists’ tastes, either. Matt Roush says it “left me cold but probably has a better chance than the streamer’s terrific historical drama ‘Death by Lightning.’ ”
More predictions: Limited / TV movie actor | Limited / TV movie actress
1.“Beef”
2. “Half Man”
3. “DTF St. Louis”
4. “Love Story: John F. Kennedy Jr. and Carolyn Bessette”
5. “All Her Fault”
6. “The Beast in Me”
7. “Bait”
8. “Lord of the Flies””
Los Angeles Times
Lorraine Ali
1. “Half Man”
2. “Bait”
3. “DTF St. Louis”
4. “All Her Fault”
5. “The Beast in Me”
“ ‘Half Man’ is the series to watch in this race, but what should you watch on your screen at home? ‘Bait,’ which follows a struggling British Pakistani actor (Riz Ahmed) as he auditions to become the next James Bond. Is the world ready for a brown Bond? Not really. Hilarity ensues.”
Freelance Critic
Kristen Baldwin
1. “Love Story: John F. Kennedy Jr. and Carolyn Bessette”
2. “Beef”
3. “The Beast in Me”
4. “DTF St. Louis”
5. “All Her Fault”
“I fear that ‘Half Man,’ Richard Gadd’s aggressively unpleasant follow–up to ‘Baby Reindeer,’ will get a knee-jerk nomination here, but that vote would be better spent on PBS’ superb adaptation of ‘The Count of Monte Cristo’ or Riz Ahmed’s ‘Bait,’ a surreal blend of showbiz satire and immigrant-family comedy.”
Los Angeles Times
Tracy Brown
1. “Beef”
2. “DTF St. Louis”
3. “All Her Fault”
4. “Lord of the Flies”
5. “The Beast in Me”
“Recent trends suggest this race might come down to voters’ appetites for bleak British miniseries. I wouldn’t be surprised if ‘Baby Reindeer’ creator Richard Gadd’s ‘Half Man’ is among the nominees, but ‘Adolescence’ co-creator Jack Thorne’s ‘Lord of the Flies’ adaptation was a bit more in my lane so I’ll give it the edge.”
Blavity
Trey Mangum
1. “Half Man”
2. “Beef”
3. “Love Story: John F. Kennedy Jr. and Carolyn Bessette”
4. “All Her Fault”
5. “DTF St. Louis”
“ ‘Love Story’ was the talk of the town when it first premiered, but the last few episodes seemed to have landed softly with the majority of people. I think later entries ‘Beef’ and ‘Half Man’ are immediately dominating conversations, and at the right time.”
TV Insider
Matt Roush
1. “Half Man”
2. “Love Story: John F. Kennedy Jr. and Carolyn Bessette”
3. “Beef”
4. “DTF St. Louis”
5. “All Her Fault”
“Not the strongest field this year, though Richard Gadd’s ‘Half Man’ and Ryan Murphy’s ‘Love Story’ seem unstoppable. The offbeat ‘DTF St. Louis’ might be a spoiler. Season 2 of Netflix’s ‘Beef’ left me cold but probably has a better chance than the streamer’s terrific historical drama ‘Death by Lightning.’ ”
Los Angeles Times
Glenn Whipp
1. “DTF St. Louis”
2. “Beef”
3. “Half Man”
4. “Love Story: John F. Kennedy Jr. and Carolyn Bessette”
5. “All Her Fault”
“ ‘DTF St. Louis’ is the standout limited series, a murder mystery in form that’s really about suburban loneliness, particularly the isolation that can cripple middle-aged men. The cast — Jason Bateman, David Harbour, Linda Cardellini, Richard Jenkins and Joy Sunday — is superb. Emmy noms for all!”
Arts
Mother Mary
Director: David Lowery
A24, Topic Studios, Access Entertainment
In Theaters: 04.24.2026
“Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee,” or whatever the fuck those silly little Catholics say. With David Lowery’s ninth feature, our dear Mother Mary is anything but full of grace. Though she is full of something … g-g-g-GHOSTS!
Mother Mary follows a distraught pop star (take a wild guess at her name), played by the always lovely Anne Hathaway (The Princess Diaries, The Devil Wears Prada), who dramatically ends up on the doorstep of her ex-best friend and costume designer, Sam Anselm (Michaela Coel, Chewing Gum, Black Mirror). She confesses to Sam, after barging her way into her secluded design studio, that she needs a dress that feels like “her.” This is something she feels her current team of designers can’t do and is very important, as she’s performing a new unreleased song to celebrate her comeback. During the creation of the gown, the two women reminisce and catch up, all in the same haunted breath. During their heart-to-heart (pun intended), they both realize that at some point since their separation, they each have been taking turns experiencing a haunting by the red, shapeless form of a (what they both determine is at least female) “ghost.”
Now, not to sound like a broken record, kids, but what is my favorite saying? That’s right, “there are no perfect movies,” and Mother Mary is an example of a very complicated and imperfectly okay movie. Lowery’s writing is, at times, far too abstract or obtuse, which can lead to quite a bit of confusion for about 100 of the film’s 112-minute runtime. Before it’s clarified, the relationship between the two female leads is hard to decipher. Are they best friends, former lesbian lovers or a secret, worse, third option? Does this red ghost actually have anything to do with unresolved feelings these women still have for each other, or is it just aesthetic?
There are also interesting “visions” Sam gets when talking things through with Mother Mary that feel somewhat like they tangle the film’s overall seam. It also lacks a lot of raw edges you would normally see when two women discuss a “friendship break-up.” Mary Mother also has yet to break the curse of the inaccurate on-screen popstar portrayal. I’m not sure why, but for some reason, Hollywood cannot get the feel of a popstar just quite right on screen. Mother Mary is supposed to be Lady Gaga, yet it feels like her on-stage scenes are what dads imagined watching Hannah Montana must’ve looked and felt like to their daughters. This is something that seems unfathomable when you have Jack Antonoff and Charli XCX to help write the soundtrack.
That being said, once the ending hits you in the face and you finally get the full picture that Lowery is painting, the film saves itself. Lowery does something interesting and unique when it comes to the haunting genre of horror, as his characters are not haunted by ghouls and goblins but by emotional moments or memories in time. This is something that, when done right, is the epitome of beauty and is frankly more terrifying than any jumpscare by a James Wan demon. What’s more haunting than the what-ifs and what-could-have-beens of an intense connection with another human being, romantic or platonic? What’s more punishing than being the one who committed the sin that severed your red thread connection? Lowery also puts the infamous Bechdel Test to shame, as there is not a single male character with dialogue for the entirety of the film.
Do I love what Lowery is trying to do here? Yes. Does he stumble and fumble along the way? Absolutely. I’m not saying that you shouldn’t see Mother Mary, but also if you miss it … you’re not missing much. —Yonni Uribe
Read more film reviews by Yonni Uribe:
Wasatch Mountain Film Festival Review: Protecting Our Playground
Film Review: The Drama
-
Nevada3 minutes agoNevada workers fear homelessness as housing, jobs vanish before July deadline | Fox News Video
-
New Hampshire9 minutes agoOpinion: The nostalgia of a small town – Concord Monitor
-
New Jersey15 minutes agoNJ, NY governors cut World Cup transit costs. Where is host committee?
-
New Mexico21 minutes agoAre National Guard troops, emergency state funds effective in Rio Arriba County?
-
North Dakota33 minutes ago
Behind the Badge – Does Poaching Really Matter?
-
Ohio39 minutes agoWhere to find splash pads, pools in central Ohio during heat wave
-
Oklahoma45 minutes agoNewspaper Deletes Column Comparing the Oklahoma City Thunder to Israel
-
Oregon51 minutes ago
Oregon Lottery Powerball, Pick 4 results for May 18
