Nights at the Opera.

Woody Allen's debut as an opera director seems to have come off well enough. For the Los Angeles Opera's new production of Puccini's trilogy of one-acts, Il Trittico, William Friedkin, an old hand at this, has directed the first two, Il Tabarro and Suor Angelica, while Allen's taken on the third, Gianni Schicchi. The New York Times' Anthony Tommasini finds Allen's work to be "a cleverly updated and inventive staging of the popular comedy, marred only by a regrettable directorial liberty at the end."

On the following day, Tommasini took in The Fly, based on David Cronenberg's 1986 remake of the 1958 B-Movie. As you'll have heard by now, Cronenberg directs; David Henry Hwang's written the libretto, Howard Shore, the music: "[D]espite the inventive staging and all-out efforts of an admirable cast - especially the courageous performance of the Canadian bass-baritone Daniel Okulitch as Seth Brundle, the obsessed scientist who morphs into the hideous creature he calls Brundlefly - The Fly is a ponderous and enervating opera, and the problem is Mr Shore's music."

"Just about any subject is ripe for opera," writes Mark Swed in the Los Angeles Times. "The film world and lyric stage have been influencing and stealing from each other since the days of silents. Brundlefly is no less reasonable a character for musical amplification than Rigoletto.... I'm sorry to have to agree with the French critics who saw The Fly first and began the string of bad buzz jokes. The premiere was two months ago in Paris at the Théâtre du Châtelet, which co-commissioned the work. The reaction was unkind.... I am at a loss to understand why The Fly has turned out so dreary, despite the inclusion of sex, nudity, puppetry and athleticism."

Back to Puccini. Friedkin's one-acts constitute "a pair of smart, beautifully crafted, beautifully designed and beautifully performed productions that gave grit, grandeur and even a hint of class to old-fashioned melodrama," writes Swed. "Meanwhile, the self-deprecating Allen, who described himself to the Times recently as 'not the greatest choice in the world' to direct an opera, turned out to be the greatest choice in the world for the comic conclusion to Trittico."

Also in the LAT, Chloe Veltman watches Amy Tan coach singers in the run-up to Saturday's premiere of the San Francisco Opera's production of The Bonesetter's Daughter: "Five years ago, when this 56-year-old, Bay Area- and New York-based author embarked on the process of transforming into an opera her book about an American-born Chinese woman's relationship with her aging immigrant mother and ghostly Chinese grandmother, little did the first-time librettist imagine that she'd be working directly with the singers. 'I had no idea how opera was made,' says Tan, best known for her candid excavations of mother-daughter relationships in such bestsellers as The Joy Luck Club (she also co-wrote Wayne Wang's 1993 film adaptation) and The Kitchen God's Wife. 'I was mystified by the process.'"

Posted by dwhudson at September 9, 2008 1:14 AM