NEW YORK — It was a delicious challenge that came as a total surprise.
As choreographer Annie-B Parson tells it, she was walking down a Brooklyn street when her phone rang. It was the general manager of the Metropolitan Opera, Peter Gelb, wondering if she’d be interested in choreographing for the Met.
Parson, based in Brooklyn, founder of the Big Dance Theater and also known for choreographing David Byrne’s joyous “American Utopia” on Broadway, had never done an opera and acknowledges she knew little about the art form.
But of course she was interested. It was the Met’s buzzy, commissioned production of “The Hours,” about the interior lives of three women connected - across generations and an ocean - by Virginia Woolf and her writings (one of them Woolf herself).