Leon Major--Giving Opera a New Look in the Capital

Leon Major had a flash of deja vu some years ago when his son, Joshua, starting out for the university, announced that he wanted to become a stage director. “We were absolutely overwhelmed, my wife, Judith, and I,” Major recalls. “He had never said a word about it earlier. Then I remembered that I had done the same thing with my parents when I was 18 and going off to the University of Toronto.”

Surprising your parents with plans for a show-biz career is becoming a tradition in the family. The younger Major, now 27, has a string of operatic productions to his credit and is about to direct his first “La Traviata” in Saskatchewan. But it will take a while to match the track record that his father has achieved in his mid-’50s, not only in Canada but across the United States and increasingly in Washington, where he has just bought a home.

Some of Leon Major’s work here is academic--he is the director of the ambitious new opera program at the University of Maryland in suburban College Park. But those who love the theater, particularly the musical theater, are more likely to recognize his name because of his creative work at the Kennedy Center.

The “Barber of Seville” that opened this week at the Kennedy Center’s Eisenhower Theater is only the latest in a series of assignments for the Washington Opera. Major was responsible for that company’s brilliant staging of Rossini’s “L’Italiana in Algeri,” with a windup phonograph in the overture, a vintage Mercedes-Benz featured in the decor, a hilarious spaghetti-eating scene with Francois Loup and dozens of other imaginative touches. His distinctive approach may be remembered from the company’s “Daughter of the Regiment” last season, and its earlier “Abduction From the Seraglio.” Last summer, he directed “Sullivan and Gilbert” at the Kennedy Center, a show whose slender plot served as a framework for some of the most imaginatively staged Gilbert and Sullivan numbers this city has seen.

There was no assurance of such a busy career when Major first brought up the idea. His father, a Russian emigre to Canada, had studied singing but couldn’t make a living at it. He was skeptical about his son’s plans when they were first announced, back in 1952.

“My father was not opposed to my going into the theater,” Major recalls, “but he said, ‘How do you make a living in the theater in a country where there is no theater?’ My answer was, ‘Well, we’ll have to make our own.’ ”

That’s what he did: He founded the Neptune Theatre in Halifax, which is celebrating its 25th anniversary this year. He describes it proudly as “the first theater in Canada to have a permanent company on an annual contract--even paid vacations for actors.”

His operatic career began with a Toronto production of “I Pagliacci.” “That was in 1961,” he recalls. “I knew from nothing about how you do an opera. All I knew was the theater.” But he said “sure” when he was offered the assignment and did not flinch when he discovered that it would be sung in Italian, a language he knew not at all. “I went off and got the score and an Italian dictionary and translated it word for word.”

When his “Pagliacci” went onstage -- a modernized production, set in Italy in 1946 with American soldiers in the crowd and the little acting troupe traveling around in a secondhand army truck--it set a precedent.

Until then, assignments such as this in major Canadian opera productions had always been given to Europeans. Six years later, when he was asked to direct “Louis Riel,” an opera commissioned for the Canadian Centennial, the situation had changed. The opera, an expression of national pride, was put on by a Canadian company using a Canadian director, conductor and designers to present the work of a Canadian composer.

Now, Major has sold his Toronto home, bought a home in downtown Washington and settled in for a long stay. This move represents partly his expectation of more work with the Washington Opera, but mostly a firm commitment to the University of Maryland and above all enchantment with the city.