The red-hot Australian director Simon Stone talks a great game. Check out his preemptive apologia for the Met’s new Lucia di Lammermoor, wherein Stone transposes the action from Sir Walter Scott’s romantic Scottish highlands to America’s crumbling Rust Belt. Out with the old clichés, in with the new! Much bullied, the strung-out heroine takes refuge in OxyContin. Why wouldn’t she snap in the bridal chamber? (For “snap,” read “stabs the groom to death.”) Though much has changed, some things will stay the same. Yes, there’s a wedding dress in the Mad Scene. “That’s unavoidable,” Stone explains—reassuringly or with regret, who is to say? As the director has proved many times over, his stagecraft has the technological precision of a moonshot. That said, let’s stipulate that his productions are not productions so much as colossal performance-art installations synchronized with works he obliterates without compunction. On the vocal front, the Met’s latest Lucia promises bel canto in excelsis. Nadine Sierra stars as the lonely dreamer who sees ghosts, opposite Javier Camarena as the true love she is forced to betray. —Matthew Gurewitsch