In Fall 2025, I had the pleasure of directing Pauline Viardot’s Cendrillon as part of the University of Arizona School of Music’s opera season, which was my first production as interim Director of Opera. It was also a chance to take a familiar story and give it a fresh setting and motif in the form of Pop Art.

Viardot’s Cendrillon is a charming, lesser-known operatic take on the Cinderella story, written by one of the 19th century’s most remarkable composers. Rather than setting the piece in its original time period, our production moved the story to 1950s Paris, drawing on the bold colors, playful shapes, and irreverent spirit of Pop Art. Taking a story about transformation and giving it a new context, via a movement that was shaking up the art world at the time just worked.

To bring the spirit of Pop Art to our cast, we invited a guest speaker from the university’s art museum to talk with the students about what Pop Art was rebelling against, what it was celebrating, and how those same ideas could be in found in Viardot’s opera.

From there, I asked each student to create their own collage in the Pop Art style, capturing some aspect of the opera as they understood it. It became a way for the cast to connect with the material visually before ever setting foot on stage, and it grounded their performances in something more personal than just following stage directions.

We pulled in visuals inspired by Pop Art for the production’s backdrops, created by Sally Day, School of Music Opera Set Designer.

Directing Cendrillon was a great start to the 2025/2026 academic year. It’s a story everyone thinks they know, but we made it new again by looking at it through an unexpected lens. One of my favorite parts of directing is finding the thread between where a work came from and how we choose to present it now.