He was born on 16/9/1949 in New York. He made his debut in the Tony Award winning rock musical Two Gentlemen of Verona during the New York Shakespeare Festival. In opera, he started off as an assistant to Jean-Pierre Ponnelle in Houston, Paris and Salzburg. In 1982, he began a regular collaboration with the Long Beach Opera as producer and director, gaining international accalim for his groundbreaking stagings. There he directed the operas Death in Venice, The Barber of Seville [Il barbiere di Siviglia], Orfeo and The Coronation of Poppaea [L'incoronazione di Poppea] by Monteverdi, The Turk in Italy [Il turco in Italia], Ariadne on Naxos [Ariadne auf Naxos], The Threepenny Opera [Die Dreigroschenoper] and the world premiere of Hopper’s Wife by Stewart Wallace and Michael Korie. He has directed in many American opera houses, the Welsh National Opera, the English National Opera, the Scottish Opera, the Opera Zuid in the Netherlands, the Theater Basel, the Opéra Comique in Paris, the Grand Théâtre de Genève, The New Israeli Opera, etc. He works closely together with the San Francisco Opera: The Tales of Hoffmann [Les contes d'Hoffmann], Cinderella [La cenerentola], The Ghost Sonata, The Betrayed Sea [Das verratene Meer]. Together with his twin brother David, he has directed the operas Don Giovanni, Thus Do They All [Così fan tutte] and The Marriage of Figaro [Le nozze di Figaro]. For the GNO he directed the operas The Prisoner [Il prigioniero] and The Brief Life [La vida breve] (2006/07).