Monday, August 14, 2006
It Ain't Necessarily So
I'm not a fan of opera at the best of times. I bought a ticket to yesterday's matinee of Porgy & Bess thinking it was a musical rather than an opera. Operatic singing kinda shits me. OK, 'kinda' is too kind - it shits me a lot and a little bit of it is all it'll take to make me switch off the radio. I wanted to see this show because I was told that the show can only ever be done with an African-American cast, which is why it's not down under often. I discovered a second reason; it's pretty boring.
T-bone & I talked about the story this morning. I don't think many people go to musical theatre or opera for a story, but even so, there wasn't much of one there. Maybe it passed as OK when Gershwin wrote it, I don't know. I don't think anyone will be pitching a 'cripple-with-a-heart-of-stone-meets-floozy, cripple-falls-for-floozy, floozy-leaves-with-drug-dealer' tragedy to Hollywood any time soon. Maybe Baz Luhrmann could make something of it as a sequel to Moulin Rouge...
That said, for my money black americans have the best singing voices on the planet, so the afternoon wasn't a complete waste. And for $90 a ticket there was no way I wasn't going to sit through the whole show.
It didn't convert me on opera.
[Tags: Theatre, Canberra, Australia]
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Ha! Each to their own... I met someone the other day who HAD walked out halfway through, which just gobsmacked me. Obviously got money to burn.
I walked out at interval. I thought the whole performance was pretty lazy, the voices and arrangements were average and the sets smacked of a high school production. I had paid my $90 and watched a whole lot of songs i really like get done pretty poorly so i thought do i stay and let my money pay for an average time or do i leave and do something fun with the rest of my night. I chose the latter and form what i have gheard i wasn't the only one.