Despite the publicity, the bad puns and a bad back, we were eager to enjoy L.A. Opera’s season opener novelty. After all, the stories of a lot of the classic operas and ballets are every bit as preposterous. Then there was the repulsiveness issue. I can't stomach horror movies, though years ago I got dragged to David Cronenberg's remake of The Fly and never forgot it. But the problem with the opera of The Fly turned out not to be creepiness—it’s supposed to be that—but tediousness.
David Henry Hwang is obviously one of those people who think opera librettos are a branch of juvenile literature. "We are the smarties and we like to party" was the gist of an Act 1 chorus. He served up bits of Cronenberg’s remake, appropriating their significance while draining them of drama.
Howard Shore—who I remember fondly from the original Saturday Night Live and Howard Shore and His All-Nurse Band—provided music that was inoffensive but completely without dramatic punch: aural wallpaper. It reminds me that HS's music was the one thing I really disliked about The Lord of the Rings.
Daniel Okulitch wins a Good Sport Award for his portrayal of the protagonist, singing banal words, prancing about in the nude (the focus of the ad campaign), and wearing an insect head throughout Act 2.
By the time we got to the girlfriend's grand finale "I'm going to bear his mutant fly larvae child!" aria I had totally tuned out, thinking of the unproduced operas of Vivaldi, Handel, Haydn, Stravinksy, Britten, Schoenberg, Shostakovich, Dallapicola, Schnittke, Berio, Cage, Glass, Adams and Carter that LAOpera might have done instead, generating even greater publicity while actually being worthwhile.
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