Post by Captain Snark on Mar 28, 2015 17:40:58 GMT -5
The Metropolitan Opera has been screening its shows in cinemas around the world in recent years. (At those opera and ballet screenings you have to be careful about dipping into your popcorn or slurping your drink because other people think they're in the theatre in New York! I wait for moments of applause.) I just saw their new production of The Tales of Hoffman by Jacques Offenbach. (Get off'n my bach, Jacques!)
The story is about a poet called Hoffmann--based on a real German writer, believe it or not!--who goes out to Luther's German pub and tells stories to the clientele, the sort of nice chaps who sing about trashing Luther's wine cellar and imply that he's a cuckold. Seems that the biggest distraction from his poetic vocation is his never-ending drive to get laid, and get laid by the same woman again and again. Sure, they keep talking about "love," but theatregoers have always known the bottom line. Or perhaps poetry is the biggest distraction from his search for pussy. (Right now he's obsessed with a theatrical diva called Stella.) Be that as it may, he's followed everywhere by his little buddy Nicklasse, actually the cross-dressing Muse of Poetry who keeps hoping he'll put verse before dick. As if! There's also Lindorf, the nemesis who keeps thwarting his love life.
After warming up with a song about grotesque dwarf Einzach which won't please Peter Dinklage, Hoffmann starts singing about three past love affairs. The first is with a windup robot called Olympia (whatever turns you on, kook) whom he literally views with rose-colored glasses. But her creator passes underwriter Lindorf a rubber cheque, and the latter turns vengeful so Olympia gets smashed, along with the glasses.
Then he sings about his relationship with nice girl Antonia. (Can't imagine her hitch-hiking.) Antonia's father understandably didn't want his daughter to marry this chucklehead, but now that they're getting hitched tomorrow anyway, Daddykins doesn't want her to sing lest she drop dead. Lindorf is Antonia's sinister doctor, who may be doing her more harm than good. (Ya think?) If you can't guess what happens within the day, you're new to opera! Suffice it to say that in the end her pop gets one of his two wishes.
Then he sings about an affair with Venetian skank Giulietta. This time Lindorf is
There's a lot of nice music here, including the famous Barcarolle and Olympia's bird song, but as a whole this opera's inevitably uneven. Offenbach, more accustomed to operetta, died before finishing his magnum opus, and other people have finished it in several different versions. For example, in some productions they stage the Giulietta story before the Antonia story, and I personally prefer it that way: I think of Olympia as a child's love, Giulietta as adolescent love, and Antonia as adult love.
The singers? I don't remember their names, but I must say that the Met has a very talented ballet corps, including quite a few women who look great in their undies. (Yup, it's a modern staging. Beauty may not be everything, but it sure isn't nothing!) There's also a host, in this case Debra Voight of the stapled stomach, who interviews singers and others connected to the show and puts in a plug for the Met fundraisers and for local opera companies: "Nothing compares to the magic of seeing a live performance." It doesn't work with me. I've never given the Met a nickel, and I've stopped going to Toronto's Canadian Opera Company since they started these Met screenings. And I don't feel guilty, MYEH-HEH!