Opera San José sits down with Director of Patron Experience and La Traviata director Tara Branham for an intimate, behind-the-scenes exploration of what it takes to bring La Traviata to life today. In this in-depth conversation, Branham—our inaugural Stage Directing Resident—pulls back the curtain on her bold reimagining of Giuseppe Verdi’s tragic masterpiece, revealing the artistic choices, structural shifts, and emotional architecture that shape this production from the ground up.
Drawing from her roots in Chicago’s vibrant theater scene, Branham approaches the opera with a fresh, dramaturgical lens—interrogating tradition, redefining intimacy, and reshaping the narrative for a contemporary audience. From concept to staging, she invites us into the rehearsal room and the creative process, offering a rare glimpse into how a centuries-old story of love, sacrifice, and societal pressure is being rebuilt for the modern stage.
Opera San Jose: Is Violetta a victim of society, or does she actively participate in her own undoing—and how did that tension shape your staging?
Tara Branham: That’s a false dichotomy. She’s playing the hand she’s been dealt. And up until the tuberculosis card came up in the deck, she’d been excelling at beating the odds. In our staging of Violetta, I hope we’ve created a beautiful human, full of complications, who is aggressively fighting for the life she chooses, no matter how that changes from moment to moment.
OSJ: Where did you intentionally break tradition in La Traviata—and why was it important to disrupt the “expected” version of this story?
TB: I think an area where I further illuminate what would have been already understood by the opera goers in Verdi’s time when it premiered is in spelling out what Violetta does for a living. I have the privilege of being a professor at San Jose State University where I teach an Opera Appreciation class every semester. Last semester, I had them watch La Traviata (The Met production with Renée Fleming and Rolando Villazón) and of my 50 undergraduate students (all of whom had never seen an opera before), none of them comprehended what Violetta did for a living. Some asked if she was royalty?! So it’s less about “breaking tradition” and more about serving as a midwife to the story to our contemporary audience in a way that is very clear upon a first viewing. There is no mistaking her profession in this production. We make the transactions, the labor, and the exchange of money explicit.
OSJ: If your production had to argue one provocative idea about love, power, or control—what would it be, and where do we see it most clearly on stage?
TB: In a world obsessed with Industrialized Pleasure, true love isn’t a grand romantic gesture; it’s the audacity to bear witness and truly see someone. Power and control in this Paris are about maintaining the public facade—buying beauty, curating the guest list, hiding the ugly truths. We see this disrupted most clearly when Alfredo first enters. He doesn’t come from backstage; he comes from the audience. He crosses the boundary from being a spectator of her life to being a participant. He’s the only one who sees her and has the agency to offer care instead of currency.
OSJ: La Traviata lives at the intersection of intimacy and spectacle—how did you navigate the tension between those two worlds in your staging?
TB: We treated the spectacle not as joy, but as labor. There are people who provide the labor and those who purchase. There are unsatisfied clients and calculated transactions. The characters buy into the spectacle because if the music stops, they have to face the reality of Violetta’s wasting body along with the realities of their own unfulfilled lives. In this world: everyone wants something they cannot have. The intimacy is found in the wreckage of that spectacle. It’s what happens in the quiet moments when the filters drop and the physical, biological reality of her illness is all that’s left. The people we lower the facade for: that’s who we’re truly intimate with.
OSJ: Violetta exists both as a woman and as an idea—how did you approach shaping her physical and emotional presence on stage?
TB: First and foremost, I approached Violetta as a master performer. Not difficult to do with Mikayla Sager in the role as she already is a stunning opera singer capable of holding a crowd’s attention. Violetta is also exceptional at reading people and knowing how to give them what they want. Marie Duplessis, who Violetta was based off of, would play a demure young girl sitting on the laps of gentlemen at parties and then cuss like a sailor when reading the intellectuals for filth at the coffeehouse. She knew how to code switch, and I think people loved seeing the facets of her emerge as much as they enjoyed claiming one facet for themselves. We see this most clearly in Act 2, Scene 2, when Violetta has all of these asides about how much pain she’s in seeing Alfredo at the party, but in the scene I have her engaging with frivolity which only amps up Alfredo’s anger and the feeling that he’s been had.
OSJ: In a work so rooted in 19th-century conventions, where did you find opportunities to disrupt or reframe audience expectations?
TB: We disrupted the romanticization of the wasting disease. There is a convention in 19th-century opera to
make death look poetic—a gentle, tragic fading away. But physical failing is brutal, unfair, and deeply unromantic. By refusing to soften the edges of her medical reality, we force the audience to stop looking at her as a tragic masterpiece and start seeing her as a human being fighting for every breath.
OSJ: How did you collaborate with the design team (sets, costumes, lighting) to create a cohesive emotional landscape for the opera?
TB: When I work with an inherited set design, it’s part collaboration but also excavation. In looking at the original design, I saw that the Eiffel Tower was under construction throughout the timeline of the piece. In Act 1, the final tower was incomplete, and in Act 2, Scene 2, it was completed. This moment also coincided with the World’s Fair. There was this explosion of art and science and all of it coming together and the world changing, but the hierarchy of the social structure was still very much in place.
That juxtaposition is very clear in Act 2, Scene 2 wherein the party amplifies to a genderfucking bacchanalia. To really show the class divide, we styled Alfredo as the ultimate outsider. Because he enters from the audience in Act 1, he wears the same suit throughout the entire opera, in various stages of undress. He is a bourgeoisie intellectual living on an 8,000-franc allowance–chump change compared to the 100,000 francs Violetta’s lifestyle consumes. He doesn’t have “fuck you money,” and at the parties, he clearly didn’t get the dress code memo. Once Alfredo and the Baron (aristocratic capital) enter with Violetta, the social hierarchy snaps swiftly back into place. We’re visually reminded of what’s always at play: in this society, who has the money to matter and who doesn’t.
OSJ: What role does stillness play in your staging, particularly in a piece driven by such heightened emotion?
TB: In a world obsessed with the commodification of pleasure, stillness is dangerous. If you stop moving, the facade slips. In our staging, when the characters suffer the most–when the shock of reality breaks the machine–they drop into abject stillness. There are moments when people in this opera are truly bereft. Nothing makes sense and nothing can help. I’ve leaned into a kind of shock that occurs and just causes that absolute physical halt. It is the only time they are not performing; they are just struggling to exist.
OSJ: How did you work with the singers to balance vocal demands with physical storytelling and character embodiment?
TB: The nice thing about coming from a background in Meisner technique and Viewpoints is that I believe just about anything is possible at any moment on stage. It’s truly just a matter of convincing my collaborators to find their truth through that moment. I often say that a director has no explicit power, just the ability to convince others to give their ideas consideration. Through that collaboration, our work together emerges. So when someone tells me, no, they cannot sing that note while doing jumping jacks, I trust them to know their business. The same way that just because something might feel good to a performer on stage, doesn’t mean it’s conveying the story. The negotiation between those two things is what builds our La Traviata.
OSJ: If you could distill your interpretation of La Traviata into a single visual or gesture, what would it be?
TB: A blood-drenched white camellia.
OSJ: What do you hope audiences carry with them after experiencing your vision of this opera—what lingers in the silence after the final note?
TB: I hope the image of Alfredo, left alone on the apron of the stage after the curtain falls, lingers with them. But I don’t want the audience to leave with pity for a tragic heroine; I want them to leave in awe of her bravery to pursue her life.
Violetta’s ultimate audacity wasn’t conquering the
demimonde of Paris–it was her willingness to let that facade completely collapse and allow herself to be seen in her rawest, most terrifying reality. Alfredo is too late to save her. He arrives after the structure has already failed. But his presence matters because he becomes the sole witness to her fight. I want the audience to realize that while the machinery of the opera moves on to the next party, Violetta’s life had undeniable weight because someone, finally, didn’t look away. Her bravery was showing him what was under the mask; his was standing in the ruins to bear witness to it, even when the lights went out.