Elizabeth Kramer

@arts_bureau

Kentucky Opera brings rarely performed Puccini work to Louisville.

The films of Italian director Sergio Leone influenced the design of this opera production.

"It sounds so much like those big John Ford western movies with those Dimitri Tiomkin scores."

"Some people seem to relegate the opera to a bunch of singing cowboys," said John Hoomes, about the story "La Fanciulla del West" in Italian, or "The Girl of the Golden West."

Yes, it has cowboys; it has a saloon, gambling, guns and people pining for gold against a California landscape. But this is an opera by Giacomo Puccini, known as one of the greatest opera composers. Yet, this opera — which the Kentucky Opera is set to debut under Hoomes' direction — is rarely performed.

It's not that the opera by the composer of "La Boheme," "Tosca," "Madama Butterfly" and "Turandot" doesn't have artistic merit.

"This music has been very influential," Hoomes said in a recent telephone call, citing echoes of it in Andrew Lloyd Webber's "Phantom of the Opera" and in Hollywood movies. "It sounds very cinematic, although it was written in 1910 before film cinema. It also sounds like so many Hollywood composers borrowed from it because it sounds so much like those big John Ford western movies with those Dimitri Tiomkin scores."

The problem is that staging this opera requires a large cast that includes five principle and 10 secondary roles and a chorus of 24. It can make for a costly proposition.

"It's a ton of men," he said. "The room is full of testosterone. And there are only two women in the cast."

The main woman is Minnie, whom Hoomes called "a bizarre character." As the proprietor of the local saloon, she is a businesswoman who knows how to use a gun. She teaches the Bible to the gold prospectors, but she also drinks whiskey and gambles. Many of the men are in pursuit of Minnie, but she is holding out for her one true love, who turns out to be an outlaw.

"Her mother was a cook and a bartender, while her father was in charge of gambling tables," explained soprano Michelle Johnson, who portrays Minnie in this production. "She saw the love they had and always desired that. But don't mess with her, or she'll bring out her gun."

Hoomes first produced this work at Nashville Opera, where he has been the artistic director since 1995, but the title has been on his bucket list of unconventional operas he wanted to direct since he was a student at Indiana University's Jacobs School of Music in the 1980s. There he had heard the music and later sought out recorded productions to watch. However, by the time he sought to stage the piece himself, he hadn't seen the opera.

When Hoomes set out to realize his long-held desire to stage this Puccini piece, he had a cohort — production designer Barry Steele. The two first met to join forces on Sarasota Opera's 1998 production of "Jenufa" by Czech composer Leos Janacek and went on to launch more than 40 productions together. For this piece, both looked at a lot of Hollywood westerns and the Spaghetti westerns of Italian director Sergio Leone.

"There were just too many parallels between those films and this opera not to take this up," Steele said.

For Hoomes, the ambiance of Leone's "Once Upon a Time in the West" was a stylistic touchstone for this opera, alongside the 1946 film "Duel in the Sun" with passionate characters portrayed by Gregory Peck and Jennifer Jones, who end up shooting at each other in the desert.

To achieve that the two worked together to fashion a panorama for the opera that simulates Western films. Steele contributed cinema-like projections and videography to the sets that he and Hoomes matched to the emotional line of Puccini's music.

"Sometimes the video plays off the action on stage," Hoomes said. "It's not just a backdrop that sits there. It's almost like its own character."

One of those instances is when Minnie first kisses the lover she has longed for, an outlaw named Dick Johnson. While Puccini's music illustrates the flood of emotions with an intense arrangement that emanates from the orchestra, something else happens in the scenery of a night sky filled with stars.

"As they kiss, the stars slowly move and then go faster until they spin into a tornado of stars," Hoomes said. "At the climax of the kiss, they all fall from heaven and they rise up again."

The technical aspects of the production also draw on the innovative title sequences that Iginio Lardani created using motion graphics for Leone's films, which include "A Fistful of Dollars" (1964) and "The Good, The Bad and The Ugly" (1966). In those graphics, the film titles and the names of the cast and crew shift as they fade in and out of the frame using colors and other special effects.

"He created the iconography of the spaghetti western," Steele said. "And it was clear to John and me that for Americans watching "La Fanciulla del West" this style was probably one of the most potent ways that we could create a show for them because it evokes so much about the West for us."

Steele said he and Hoomes were careful to remain true to Puccini's music by creating imagery that supports it.

"When you're working with cinema-like projections and videography, you really have the opportunity to follow the emotional line of the music," Steele said. "It was really just taking the influence of the revolutionary visual style of the spaghetti western and creating it with the succinct music and storyline of Puccini's opera."

Since the production made its world premiere at Nashville Opera in 2012, Hoomes and Steele have taken it to the Indianapolis Opera and Alabama's Mobile Opera. But taking this production to other companies wasn't something they had in mind when they created it. It was only after the popularity among Nashville audiences made it into a hit, that they thought about that possibility. What made re-creating the production so easy was that it has a set consisting mainly of projections rather than heavy set pieces.

What's most important, Steele said, is that people love Puccini, and this gives them a great work that's been "horribly neglected."

"And once you listen to it," Steele added, "you find it has all that wonderful emotional content that other Puccini operas have."

Reporter Elizabeth Kramer can be reached at (502) 582-4682. Follow her on Twitter at @arts_bureau.

PUCCINI'S 'LA FANCIULLA DEL WEST' or 'GIRL OF THE GOLDEN WEST'

What: Presented by the Kentucky Opera. An opera in three acts sung in Italian with English supertitles. Italian libretto by Guelfo Civinini and Carlo Zangarini based on the play "The Girl of the Golden West" by American author David Belasco.

When: 8 p.m. Nov. 14; 2 p.m. Nov. 16

Where: Brown Theatre, 315 W. Broadway

Extras: An opera preview will be presented one hour before each performance in the Brown Theatre Rehearsal Hall. An Opera Talk Back with conductors, stage directors and artists will take place after the Sunday performance in the Brown Theatre's first-floor conference room.

Tickets: $34 to $98. (800) 775-7777; www.kyopera.org; www.kentuckycenter.org.