Christopher Alden (director)

Christopher Alden (born 1949 in New York) is an American theater and opera director. He is the twin brother of David Alden, also an opera director. Both brothers belong to a generation of modernist directors that includes Robert Wilson and Peter Sellars. and are known for staging revisionist productions of opera.

Alden and his identical twin David came from a show business family. Their father was the playwright Jerome Alden, and their mother was the Broadway dancer Barbara Gaye. As such, the brothers were drawn to musical theater from an early age. As eight-year-olds, they listened to recordings of Gilbert & Sullivan operetta, and as teenagers in the mid-'60s, they frequently bought standing room tickets at the Metropolitan Opera. By age 13, both had decided they wanted to be directors of opera.

Christopher studied theater at the University of Pennsylvania and began his stage career as an actor, appearing in Joseph Papp’s New York Shakespeare Festival production of Two Gentlemen of Verona in the early ‘70s. But he was soon apprenticed to opera director Jean-Pierre Ponnelle, working as his assistant in Houston, Paris and Salzburg. In 1974, Alden staged his first opera productions in New York (Francis Poulenc's Les mamelles de Tirésias) and Omaha (La Traviata and The Barber of Seville). More assignments followed during the 1970s at Santa Fe Opera, Opera Theatre of St. Louis and Dallas Opera as well as a continuing relationship with Opera Omaha.

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