NEW YORK: Verdi goes Vegas in a flashy new production of the opera “Rigoletto” at the Metropolitan Opera in New York that features neon lights, a Cadillac and a naked cabaret dancer.

Tony award-winning director Michael Mayer has moved the original story from 16th century Italy to 1960s Sin City. His gamble appears to have paid off with audiences, although theater critics are not so sure.

One of Giuseppe Verdi's masterpieces, the opera tells the tragic story of the deformed jester Rigoletto in the court of the Duke of Mantua, his beautiful daughter Gilda and a twisted love triangle involving the duke and a courtier.

Mayer said the piece translated naturally to the Nevada desert, or, more specifically, to a hotel and casino in America's gambling capital. “What is the cultural equivalent to the world of this opera? It's licentious, it's decadent, it's a world where women are basically play things and sexual objects,” Mayer said. “It's a place where there is a lot of glamour, a lot of money and power and sex and violence, a place where there is a culture of luck and belief in superstition. So, I thought of Las Vegas, of course.”