Reviews

Der Rosenkavalier
Vancouver Opera

Photo: Beth Clayton as Octavian, Tracy Dahl as Sophie

"...a rock-solid ensemble production..."
"The stage was alive with minor characters, purposely at work with business that never distracted. Each and every secondary role was solidly presented.
"Gately's conception was always theatrically effective, and his approach to the long wordy libretto was briskly entertaining."
— Vancouver Sun

God knows how the subject came up, but a barnacled opera queen once told me his two part recipe for a happy death. Decency forbids I should mention component number two, but it was to be administered immediately after seeing a first-rate production of Der Rosenkavalier. I've lost track of the OQ in question, but should he be still among us, he should get his saggy ass to Vancouver, where there are well-equipped specialists from whom he might procure one of his requirements, and a season opener from the Vancouver Opera that will provide the other.
This was the opera's first production in Vancouver, and it was well worth the wait. This was a fabulous night in the theatre: in the house, on the stage, and in the pit.
Stage director David Gately managed to keep the three long acts focused and lively, a great study in the art of creating tension and release.
Hearing the three leading women sing the gorgeous "Trio" that's Rosenkavalier's extended musical climax, I was struck by how the Vancouver Opera has achieved a new maturity. It was a transcendant moment. You could have died happy.
— The Georgia Straight


The challenge of this opera is that it must find a way to maintain its dignity and still touch our hearts in the midst of so much playfulness. Strauss was up to his elbows in merry pranks in Rosenkavalier, from characters to music, and this production plays its farce to the hilt. Director David Gately makes us laugh a lot and gives us plenty to look at, choreographing Strauss's score almost as if it were a ballet. Gately moves his singers around the stage extremely deftly; nobody just stands there and sings.
— The Globe and Mail

Das Rheingold
Academy of Vocal Arts, Philadelphia

The hearts of many Wagner fans must have skipped a beat when the Academy of Vocal Arts announced a production of Das Rheingold. Those hearts skipped another beat after they discovered AVA was performing this grandly orchestrated score with a piano accompaniment.
Any doubt about the piano accompaniment disappeared at the end of Saturday's performance. As the Gods crossed the rainbow bridge to Valhalla, one missed the sonic splendor of Wagner's orchestra but nothing else, so persuasive was the production.
Despite the grandeur of the music, Das Rheingold is a fairly intimate work. Director David Gately stages these scenes imaginatively and deftly and tells the dramatic story with remarkable clarity.
Gately fills the dark bare set with vivid action. He suggests water as the Rhine maidens cavort in the opening scene and comes up with simple but effective solutions for showing Alberech's transformation into a dragon and a toad.
— Courier-Post


Local audiences encountered a complete rendition of the mighty opening of the monumental "Ring Cycle". From both musical and theatrical standpoints, the performance was a stunning success.
David Gately's stage direction accepted the special limitations of the theater's small stage and made the most of the tight focus forced upon him and his cast. Actions were limited in scope but boundless in excitement.
— News of Delaware County


In one of the most audacious endeavors in recent local opera seasons, the Academy of Vocal Arts Opera Theater opened its production of Wagner's Das Rheingold this weekend in Philadelphia. And yet the AVA Opera Theater pulled it off.
David Gately's stage direction was evocative but never fussy, rhetorical but never flamboyant, it maintained a surging drive toward the plot's culmination so efficaciously that the two and a half hours of the opera's single, unbroken act arched across its dramatic structure with unflagging energy.
— Chestnut Hill Local


I hoped the production would be good. I did not expect it to be great, and I never thought it would be better than all the many performances of Rheingold I have previously seen. A great student performance of Wagner is supposed to be an oxymoron: no one should underestimate the AVA.
The quality of the acting was miles above what one usually has to sit through these days.
— Mark Beers, Philadelphia Weekly Music Critic

L’elisir d'amore
Vancouver Opera

Photo: John Osborn as Nemorino

Vancouver Opera's performance of L'elisir d'amore was a celebration worth waiting for. As directed by David Gately scenes bubbled over with merriment and surprise. Even Nemorino's forlorn emotions didn't seriously threaten the festive atmosphere.
Gately underlined the action of Romani's libretto with gentle irony. During the orchestral prelude, a young Nemorino and Adina reverse the roles assigned to them by Donizetti's librettist. In this ingenious vignette, it is the boy Nemorino who rebuffs Adina instead of the other way around. As a result, the indifferent, sometimes cruel Adina becomes more understandable, and hence more sympathetic.
— North Shore News


The Elixir of Love has not been seen on the Vancouver Opera stage for 30 years but David Gately's delightful production was worth the wait. Gately's kinetic directorial style kept the show moving without overdoing the slapstick, throwaway jokes and sight gags. He used points of repose only for moments of sentiment and reflection, and crowd scenes to enhance atmosphere, either by involving the crowds in the action itself, or by holding them in a static tableau, throwing the actions of the principals into strong relief.
All in all, performers and audience alike had a rollicking good time. This is comic opera as it should be.

Cosi fan tutte
Kentucky Opera

Photo: Jennifer Rivera as Dorabella

David Gately appreciates the keen periphery that keeps "Cosi fan tutte" from being exclusively farce.....He takes da Ponte pretty much at the librettist's word, tweaking key moments to emphasize a certain conceit, or to articulate transitions that might become awkward.
Da Ponte gets to the point quickly and so does Gately - as the curtain rises on Guglielmo and Ferrando declaring the fidelity of their respective lovers, the comic momentum is immediately established. The entire production has a crisp, vigorous quality that encourages us to home in on each intriguing comic layer.
Gately delights in physical comic commentary and (the cast) take(s) everything he throws at them.
— Louisville Courier-Journal

Don Pasquale

Photo: Matthew Polenzani as Ernesto

"A Cheerful Success"
A brilliant concept, consistently realized made San Diego's new production of Donizetti's "Don Pasquale" a tidy success.
Relocating - not updating - the action from its Italian origins to the wild American West certainly does not contradict the very human, very funny predicament of the mature successful gentleman attempting to take a younger wife. Surrounded by attractive western backdrops and decors, and underlined by Gately's effective and inventive staging, it all works, in a cheerful comedic way.
Pasquale's mansion becomes a hotel, with an office attached, the estate garden in the finale turns into a sagebrush and cactus yard, Ernesto laments Malatesta's apparent betrayal not by himself, but in a brothel, while being given a bath by ladies of a certain profession.
— Los Angeles Times

Don Pasquale
Kentucky Opera
"Old West take on opera is whimsical, genuine"
So much of opera production involves reconciling the possible with the practical that innovation – when it comes from a stage director's mind – must be tempered by the realities of appealing to mainstream audiences through mainstream works.
I tossed this notion through my mind all during Kentucky Opera's production of Donizetti's "Don Pasquale," which had the first of two performances Friday night at the Kentucky Center for the Arts. It's very much a romp in the classic buffa tradition, but with a decidedly alternative perspective: set in 1880s Arizona, complete with six-shooters, a bordello and quite a lot of cactus. When a projected translation of one greeting reads "Howdy, partner," you know that custom is being deliberately and agressively tweaked.
The essential character, however, is the staging itself. A collaboration between director David Gately and designer Tony Fanning, shared by Kentucky Opera and five other North American companies, it's a constant nudge in the ribs. And you know what? It's remarkably persuasive.
What could easily have seemed arbitrary or irrelevant here becomes a reasonable extension of theatrical possibility. Pasquale as a hotelier? Why not. Ernesto as a droopy-eyed, lovelorn cowboy? Sure. Gately wants to have fun, to test expectations and to add a certain dimensionality to an opera that is positioned well for such manipulations.
So Gately fashions a horse opera where the horse rolls in on wheels, a cathouse where the ladies coo at a bubble-bathed client, and the total effect reminds us that "Don Pasquale" does not need to be taken terribly seriously. It's almost like witnessing a production of "Noises Off," where the gags and physicality and sheer momentum of the production are what drives your interest. Gately's "Pasquale" embraces that dizziness, and invites us to as well.
Ultimately, and perhaps contradicting initial impressions of his ideology, Gately's staging is about deference to Donizetti's score. The director gives necessary space to the opera's major arias and ensemble pieces, reinforcing comic sentiment in a way that freshens our view of this small universe.
Isn't that enough for one evening in the theater?
— Louisville Courier-Journal

The Barber of Seville
Kentucky Opera

Photo: Joyce DiDonato as Rosina, Daniel Mobbs as Figaro

Gately paid particular attention to the climax of Act One. This is one of the busiest sequences in the repertory, where the hastening business among the characters can reduce the scene to indistinct physical humor.
Here, however, clarity is maintained and even heightened. As the music quickens and the crescendos take hold Gately puts the entire spectacle in slow motion and freeze frame: an almost literal evocation of Rossini's "Fredda ed immobile"....it fits elegantly into the director's overall scheme of suggesting alternative perspectives on the opera's accelerating absurdities.
Several of the production's more enticing bits belonged to Bertha. Also, Bertha's relationship with Ambrogio was worth studying: it was subtext, perhaps, yet somehow essential.
— Louisville Courier-Journal

La Traviata
Fort Worth Opera

Photo: Brenda Harris as Violetta

Brenda Harris came on like a whirlwind of proflegacy, and not an entirely loveable one. But that take on the tragic heroine by Harris and director David Gately worked magnificently building a character who ultimately chooses generosity over pride and pleasure.
The best vocal and emotional fireworks of the evening came in the contest of wills between Harris's Violetta and the elder Germont portrayed by baritone Kelly Anderson.
Gately brought a further edge of urbanity and dissipation with humorous, almost sarcastic staging of the ballet. There was no mistaking these dissipated party-goers for responsible citizens.
— Fort Worth Star-Telegram

La Traviata
Vancouver Opera

Photo: Darina Takova as Violetta

David Gately, the best producer of comic opera to work with the company in memory, showed coniderable flair too in deftly defining the character interplay at the very heart of this eternally moving opera.
— Opera Magazine

Vancouver Opera's La Traviata has a lot going for it, especially in the realms of stage direction. Although this production showed him to be sensitive to the nuances of tragedy, director David Gately's lively style was at its heady best in the comedic sections. Crowd scenes were particularly effective: the Rabelaisian carousing of Violetta's party guests as the curtain rises instantly sweeps the audience into the action.
— Westender

La Traviata was a winner in every respect, one of the company's best-integrated productions in recent years.
All of this was abetted by the chorus that had never had a livelier time in a VO production, thanks to the direction of David Gately, who brought his familiar ebullient skill in comic works to effective play with two of the livelist party scenes in local operatic memory.
— Opera Canada

Madama Butterfly
Seattle Opera

"Production is Gripping"
The production is straight forward but not lacking in imagination. Drama is omnipresent.
David Gately, who made his Seattle Opera debut in 1992 with a lively, engaged reading of Rossiin's "The Barber of Seville" was the stage director. With few exceptions, his staging is a world apart from the standard "Butterfly." With Gately, there are a myriad of details that illustrate the story and define characters and their relations to one another.
There is a meticulous side to Gately, such as the form of Butterfly's ritual suicide.
— Seattle Post-Intelligencer

Carmen
Florida Grand Opera
David Gately's direction was exemplory, moving the large chorus and principals effectively and keeping the stage action fluid and focused... a lively, colorful and extraordinarily combustible production.
— Sun-Sentinal

Salome
Fort worth Opera
"The Shock of the Traditional"
Working with traditional sets and costumes from the Opera Company of Philadelphia, stage director David Gately, whose work has been one of Ft. Worth Opera's greatest strengths in recent seasons, pulled the character of Herodias a bit more forward than usual.
— Forth Worth Star Telegram

Norma
Fort worth Opera
The plot and setting of "Norma" provide ample challenge for the modern director. Audiences in Italy in the 1830's were so focused on beautiful singing that dramatic motion takes a back seat. Aiming at the audience in 2002, director David Gately maintained a reasonable pace; the singing actors and actresses constantly created enough intensity to keep the audience's interest. The introduction of a chilling ritualistic human sacrifice at the opening of the performance provided an appropriate sense of cold violence.
— Forth Worth Star Telegram

Little Women
Fort worth Opera
Fort Worth Opera's production conveys this remarkable piece in all its glory. You didn't come away remembering vocal prowess, but the characters and the music.
— Dallas Morning News