January 2014
Badisches Staatstheater Karlsruhe, Germany
Revived at the Teatro de Maestranza, Seville, Spain in March 2015
Opera by John Adams
Libretto by Peter Sellars
Direction by Yuval Sharon
Music Direction by Johannes Willig
Stage by Dirk Becker
Costume Design by Sarah Rolke
Animation by Benedikt Dichgans, Philipp Engelhart, Andreas Grindler
Dramaturgy by Bernd Feuchtner
Sharon received the Götz Friedrich Prize for best opera direction for this production of John Adams’s opera about the detonation of the atomic bomb. His staging featured two diverse aesthetics articulating the different acts: a comic-book approach to the first act, with video projections and sliding panels offering quick shifts of perspectives and scale; and a larger-than-life blank page of graph paper, dwarfing the individual actors of history into a realm of possible outcomes.