March 20, 2009: Spoofing the spoofer

This year's full-length opera offering by the San Francisco Conservatory of Music will be Orpheus in the Underworld, by Jacques Offenbach.  I give the English title rather than the original French (Orphée aux enfers) because the performance will be sung in English.  Since Wikipedia cites the Penguin Opera Guide for declaring this "the first classical full-length operetta," the selection of English has its advantages.  This is a light work, whose lightness is best appreciated when the audience does not have to contend with a foreign language.

One of these days I may encounter an English version that captures a more vulgar reading of the French as Orpheus Goes to Hell.  This would honor not only the key event in the original mythological source but also the operetta's attitude towards more traditional settings, such as those of Claudio Monteverdi's Orfeo and Christoph Willibald Gluck's Orfeo ed Euridice.  Offenbach thumbs his nose at those who wax lyrical over the "heavenly" qualities of those two preceding operas by merrily dispatching them to "th' other place" (as Hamlet put it to Claudius) and reducing some of Gluck's best known thematic material to banal cliché.  All the mythological characters are secondary to Public Opinion, a mezzo prude who makes it her mission to rework the myth into "a moral tale for the ages" (quoted from the Wikipedia entry for the operetta).  (The only production I have seen was given by the Los Angeles Opera about twenty years ago.  Public Opinion did far more speaking than singing, since the role was played by Dom DeLuise in drag.)  The plot is a perfect recipe for screwball comedy, culminating (without giving away any details) in an "Infernal Galop" better known today as the "Can-can."  In the spirit of taking as many liberties with Offenbach as Offenbach took with Gluck, Conservatory Opera Theatre Director Richard Harrell has chosen to set the whole affair in Sixties San Francisco giving it, "a silly, sexy, psychedelic, San Francisco twist."

Performances will take place at the Cowell Theater in Fort Mason, which I have found to be an ideal setting for smaller-scale operatic efforts.  There will be four performances, at 7:30 PM on April 2–4 and at 2 PM on April 5.  Further information can be found on the Web page for the production or by calling the Cowell Theater box office at 415-345-7575.  There is also a Web page for ordering tickets online.