A general statement of dismay: the lighting in this production was perhaps the worst we had ever experienced.  

The first half of the first act was almost impenetrable black; the second half of the first act was so bright as to make the singers into silhouettes.   Lighting was a little bit better (not much) in Act II, but the stage was still mostly black with some spotlights that sometimes illuminated the singers and sometimes didn't, depending on how and where they stood.  Sometimes the light was so bright that half a face was erased and the other half hidden in shadows; sometimes one of the singers was illuminated while the second (or third) standing right next to him was lost in shadow.  The second half of Act III was the best for being able to see what was going on, probably because there were so many folks involved that the director realized that it would make no sense to have the majority of the singers obscured in blackness but Act IV brought back the light box that either bathed the singers in light so bright it burned out their figures or became so dark they were puppets in shadows.  

In addition, the light kept changing Kelvin temperatures, so sometimes the light was blue tinged, sometimes red tinged, sometimes green tinged, sometimes orange tinged, sometimes in the same scene.  The lighting sometimes underexposed, sometimes overexposed.  From our seats, it was frustrating and fatiguing trying to make sense out of a drama when the director so obviously went out of his way to make sure we couldn't actually see the details of it or the effort the actors were making to bring their characters to life   The director's statement that layering a veneer of acting atop the music and lyrics robs the opera of its intrinsic nature seems even more bizarre when you see a demonstration of what he must mean: murky and murkier.  Why bother with staging it at all if there is no value in the scenic, just the musical.  If not providing all the key ingredients to an opera, why not just settle for a concert performance and spare the theater the expense of a stage setting at all?  

It didn't help that the director also decided he needed to have a mesh curtain covering the stage to further obscure vision:  apparently, he was going for a dream-like concept where nothing is clear and nothing is for sure and everything is black and white, except when it isn't: his way of presenting the story seemed to be to smudge everything and leave it to the singing actors to do the best they could under dire circumstances.

Folks sitting close the the stage undoubtedly had fewer problem seeing the action and lucky for them.  From our seats in the balcony it was a struggle to maintain interest in the opera we love so much because of the strain  of trying to experience a dramatic as well as auditory performance.    We shouldn't have to choose.