LouisaMuller

Press

• Britten's Turn of the Screw

  Garsington Opera

  Jul 2022

  • Although Muller directs with an impressively light touch, her staging is bursting with the sort of connective, proliferating detail that hooks the audience into the story, and she fields the many directorial cues Britten wrote into his score with a disarming elegance. Of the many productions I've seen of this work, I reckon that, for subtlety and layers of meaning, Muller's is in a league of its own.

    • Peter Reed, Opera Magazine
    • 01 September 2022

  • Louisa Muller directed the production in 2019 and returned to revive it here, preserving the ambiguity – did the Governess see these things or imagine them? Are we viewing her fantasies, like Macbeth’s dagger “proceeding from the heat-oppressed brain”, driven by a frustrated attraction to the employer she must never contact? Muller’s production bears both interpretations, as it should. She has a sure touch for an eerie detail. In the Prologue the guardian’s intimate stroking of the face of the woman to whom he has just subcontracted the raising of his “poor little things”, is the subtlest of transgressions. It is a chilling moment when Miles repeats the exact gesture in Act 2, still more unsettling in the combative context their relationship has assumed.

    • Roy Westbrook, Bachtrack
    • 03 July 2022

• Britten's Turn of the Screw

  Garsington Opera

  Jul 2019

  • ‘A deliberate, powerful and horribly successful study of the magic of evil,’ is how one critic described Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw on its publication in 1898. The same words very much apply to Louisa Muller’s new Garsington staging of Britten’s opera, a beautiful, unsettling piece of theatre that sifts through the work’s ambiguities with a subtlety that in itself has something of the complex finesse of James’s prose…A truly great achievement, devastating and unforgettable.

    • Tim Ashley, The Guardian
    • 03 July 2019

• Wagner's Das Rheingold

  New York Philharmonic Orchestra

  Jun 2017

  • …the Philharmonic, Mr. Gilbert and the director Louisa Muller have stripped the work to its sinews. It is a stark vision—you might be reminded of Ivo Van Hove's scorched-earth approach to classic plays—that pares away almost everything but the music and the characters.…it was a remarkable evening of music theater.

    • Zachary Woolfe, The New York Times
    • 02 June 2017

• Britten's The Rape of Lucretia

  Wolf Trap Opera

  Jun 2016

  • …an intense wallop of a well-sung production.…this opera, as presented and gently updated by director Louisa Muller, was at times downright monumental in its statements, with even its whispers sheathed in iron.

    • Anne Midgette, Washington Post
    • 12 June 2016

  • Louisa Muller's staging was simple and dramatically effective, with Erhard Rom's set evoking the marble and rusticated stone of a Roman setting, while the costumes of the soldiers suggested a modern American present.

    • Charles T. Downey, Ionarts
    • 12 June 2016

• Corigliano's Ghosts of Versailles

  Wolf Trap Opera

  Jul 2015

  • It is a dazzling thing all around.…The opportunity to hear a modern work of this stature comes along all too rarely, a production of this quality still rarer.

    • Robert Battey, Washington Post
    • 13 July 2015

  • Chances are that Wolf Trap Opera will be using its production of John Corigliano's The Ghosts of Versailles as a touchstone for a long time to come. The venture was satisfying on every level.…The complex layers…inspired deftly detailed stage direction from Louisa Muller, who kept the action fresh and involving.

    • Opera News
    • 12 July 2015

  • Directed by Louisa Muller, this production is as silly as it is masterful, and is perfect for people who are new to the Opera...

    • Julia Amis, DC Theater Arts
    • 14 July 2015