(no subject)

[cahn]

All right, I've wanted to do this for a while:

The problem with operas is that they're too long. By which I mean, if anyone in them was sensible they'd all be at most half the length.

So: comment with an opera name (*) and I'll respond with a short snippet of a canon-divergence AU where the opera is Much Shorter. Warning, of course, that at least some of the characters will be wildly out of character. That is to say, probably much more sensible. :)

(*) If it's an opera I know, you'll get the ficlet much sooner. If it's one I haven't watched yet, I'll put it on my list to watch and you'll get the ficlet once I've watched it. This is a good opportunity for you to get me to watch your favorite opera, since after I finish Norma with Caballé I'm gonna go back to RL opera friend and ask for more DVDs! (Though given my previous track record, this might also take a while.)

(cross-posted to tumblr)

Comments

[carmarthen]

I was kind of expecting a satire with a sense of humor (the vague outline sounded Relevant to My Interests) but it was...not that. Also the version I saw had a lot of murder. So much murder (someone got ripped in half, someone got burned alive, etc.). It ended with the narrator (the last one alive) aiming a gun at the audience. I am not sure what they were going for. But I didn't like the music, so I don't think I'll ever find out of a more normal staging would be better.

I don't mind regie (or restaged Shakespeare) in theory, but it's got to have a concept that actually adds something to the experience. To be fair, traditional stagings do too, but when they don't they tend to be flat rather than offensively awful.

[cahn]

...huh. "Satire with a sense of humor" was actually what I had thought it was about, through vague osmosis. Interesting, I am revising my thoughts on looking this up :)

I have been watching a lot of regie lately, and it definitely ranges from "ohhhhh the concept really made me think about this in a different way" to "some of that was quite interesting and some of it was trying Too Hard" to "yeah, that was just a total mess." But none of it has been quite as much of a mess as what you've described! (Also, I'm watching pretty much all of this on video, which makes it a lot easier to nope out when necessary!)

[carmarthen]

It...might be possible to stage it that way, but it's hard to tell from what I saw.

(I didn't even mention that one of the protags spent an entire scene snuggling with a dead octopus bigger than her. Boringly.

TBH, I don't even know HOW they managed to pull off bizarre and boring at the same time. Quite a feat. I liked everything else I saw there, but the other things I saw were vastly less regie.)

[cahn]

Okay, I laughed at the concept of snuggling with a dead octopus and making it BORING. Wow.(Although it kind of makes sense. Reading about it sounds sort of surprising and cool ("a dead octopus!") but in person I think I'd be like "...why is this octopus still here. Ugh.")

...I did listen to the music yesterday on Spotify, and I remembered (my only previous experience with R. Strauss has been in orchestra) that I do like R. Strauss's music but only if really, really good musicians are involved (which sounds like was not the case for you, weird and boring staging aside). But of course it was in German so I had no idea what anyone was singing.

[carmarthen]

You'd think all the murder would be at least not boring, but nope. And the octopus, man, idek, why was it there? WHO KNOWS. I honestly have no idea about the musicians (although I did enjoy the other stuff I saw there - a competent but not amazing moderately-regie Carmen, competent traditional La Boheme, a nice Eugene Onegin ballet, a Hungarian borderline-operetta I adored...I can't remember if I saw anything else) because I was too angry about everything else to pay a lot of attention to the music (and I'm not trained enough to really tell the difference between a competent pro orchestra and a great one). I did have surtitles in English! They did not help.