How is this Magic Flute Different?

by Jonathan Dean

Seattle Opera's 2017 production of The Magic Flute, featuring costumes designed by Zandra Rhodes. Photo © Jacob Lucas

The Magic Flute is one of the world’s favorite operas, and Seattle Opera has presented it many times—once in a charming production by Maurice Sendak (of Pacific Northwest Ballet’s Nutcracker fame), once in a whimsical version by British cartoonist Gerald Scarfe, and most recently (2017) in an eye-popping production with costumes by fashion legend Zandra Rhodes.

All of those were traditional scenery/costumes/lights productions. The Magic Flute production we’re presenting this season, however, relies heavily on projections, including complex animated projections. There isn’t really any scenery—just a wall (with lots of secret doors, so singers can appear in all sorts of locations) that functions as a projection surface. The projections create the many locations demanded by the story, and much more.

Seattle Opera's 2018 production of The Turn of the Screw featured video projections throughout the opera. Photo © Jacob Lucas

Opera has been using projections for decades. But as computers and projectors have gotten more sophisticated in recent years, so has the use of projections in opera—witness Seattle Opera’s 2018 The Turn of the Screw or 2022 Tristan and Isolde. This projection-filled Magic Flute production has had an extremely successful life since its birth, in 2012 at the Komische Oper Berlin; it has now been presented 75 times at theaters all over the world. Original stage director Barrie Kosky, working closely with Suzanne Andrade and Paul Barritt of 1927, a British production company, designed a show which would engage spectators visually while telling the familiar story of The Magic Flute in a way nobody had ever seen it before.

Tamino, Papageno, and the three ladies interact with animated projections. Photo © Komische Oper Berlin/Jaro Suffner

Technically it’s an extremely complicated production, with some 800 animated projection cues on top of everything else in a standard Magic Flute. The singers, of course, can’t see exactly what the audience sees; but they need to be in the right place at the right moment so what they do interacts properly with the animation.

Papageno and his bird-catching cat. Photo © Komische Oper Berlin/Jaro Suffner

For instance, Papageno is accompanied throughout the show by an animated cat (appropriate for a bird-catcher, no?). Although the baritone won’t see the cat, since it's projected on the wall behind him and his eyes will be forward, so he can see the conductor, he needs to know exactly what that cat is doing at every moment in the show so their interactions will appear genuine.

Our Seattle Opera singers are now hard at work with revival director Erik Friedman, who has worked on this production at many other opera companies. And we’ve put together a special and expanded stage management team, capable of delivering the precision demanded by this production. We can’t wait to find out what you think of it!

Here’s some footage of what the show has looked like at other opera houses:

And click here to read an interview (reprinted with kind permission of LA Opera) in which Barrie Kosky, Suzanne Andrade, and Paul Barrit discuss their inspirations—silent film, cabaret, and much more—for the phantasmagoric visuals they created for The Magic Flute.

The Magic Flute is on stage February 22–March 9, 2025 at McCaw Hall. Learn more and buy tickets at seattleopera.org/flute.