Metamorphosing into a Shapeless Mess: The Fly The Opera

Despite my general fear of the tanking economy and growing reluctance to spend any money, I had to indulge my curiosity when I heard that David Cronenberg and Howard Shore, under commission from the LA Opera were adapting their own work, THE FLY. I am not an opera buff, but I have been known to use the adjective "operatic" to describe things melodramatic or grand in scale. Although it seemed an unlikely choice for high-brow theater, the story does have operatic qualities. It's Frankenstein, or the Phantom, or some other tragic monster who probably has precedent on the classical stage.

Without knowing the stories, there are opera selections I've listened to that drew me in through musical storytelling. In the same way that I laughed the first time I heard Frank Zappa's Peaches en Regalia, I've come to appreciate classical music that can paint pictures in your brain. Once enthralled by the music, I may be interested enough to seek out the story ( which often sounds like an illustration of the music, like the best jazz vocals can capture the musical storytelling in lyric ).

I belong squarely to the "outsider" demographic that LA Opera director Placido Domingo is appealing to with his recent recruitment of film directors. Many of the opera or symphonic selections I am aware of made their way into my consciousness because I heard them in films. A number of venerated filmmakers have turned to classical for their scores, eschewing any genre of contemporary composition. Kubrick's view was that he could never get a contemporary film composer to top what a Strauss or Stravinsky had done. Can't exactly disagree with that one.

Howard Shore is, I guess, one of the more respected contemporary film composers. His Lord of the Rings score is distinctive and effective, although I felt it was slightly overused in the edit. Like anyone else in Hollywood, he's done his share of "work-for-hire"; stuff that probably meant no more than a paycheck to him. But he's worked pretty consistently with David Cronenberg, which would suggest that the collaboration is based on more than paying the mortgage.

Shore started out scoring with Cronenberg back when Cronenberg was known as more of a horror genre filmmaker. Cronenberg, with The Brood, Scanners and Videodrome, had not quite defined his own high-brow art-house, existentialist-horror genre yet, but he was on the way. Shore was there when Cronenberg first adapted The Fly, a 1950s creature-feature, into a mid-80s horror masterpiece of brain vs body.

Apparently, it was Shore's thinking years ago that THE FLY would be a great subject for opera, so once he got the commission and composed the piece, it was around him that the other creative personnel for this production coalesced. Unfortunately, if you are going to tell a story through music - a story that many are already familiar with because you have already told it - the music should be strong enough to justify it's own existence. That's not the case for THE FLY opera.

Nothing about the score was "operatic" in the sense that I would use the word. Nothing grand, or powerful and dark, like Wagner, like I might expect for a story about a man turning into an insect. Nothing much at all. Most of the score sounds like an indistinguishable sound bed of white noise - call it buzzing if you want to be charitable. It's a flat background color for the voices - which are equally written flat. Nothing ever manages to punch through and create an emotion. I found myself distracted by the English dialogue. Perhaps since operas are usually in Italian or German, when I've heard them in the past I have not been focused on the weakness of the dialogue. Here, it was inescapable, and there was the presence of the electronic libretto display above the stage ( which I suppose is now common to all opera performances ) to draw further attention to how laughably awful the sung lines were: "Care for a smoke? -No thank you, gave it up." That's by no means the worst of it, just an example of the banality.

The show was so bad, at times I found myself closing my eyes to see if the experience worked better for me as music alone - it did not. I read that Cronenberg wanted this to be different from his film, but with so much of it following the film exactly - even dialogue chunks lifted wholesale - I wondered what kind of "different" he could have possibly been going for. The film is creepy, scary, repulsive. It might exist in a genre ghetto ( you will probably never see ladies in gowns going the Chandler to see the film ), but it succeeds in its goals - it repulses you. And it does that with score, make-up, lights - the same basic ingredients available to the opera. So why does opera occupy some higher space in the cultural hierarchy? If anything, this production proves that opera can be as flaccid as television.

In the film, Jeff Goldblum contorts his body and literally transforms himself into the Brundlefly. The actor playing Brundle on stage was gifted with some impressive physical abilities, performing several feats of gymnastic strength to hammer home the point of his transformation, but he couldn't top Goldblum's total devolution, which was aided in part by outstanding special-effects make-up. Hell, Goldblum looked a little like a fly BEFORE he put the make-up on, which in a way, might've been part of the point. Isn't it about the internal being externalized? This production works overtime to try to make the connection between physical transformation and metaphysical meditation. Believe it or not, the film with all of its slime and gore, comes off more subtly in this regard because it lacks the blunt attempts to make the audience see the "existentialism" of the piece. The great thing about cheap sci-fi and horror is that, at its best, it's anything but cheap. There are great ideas and symbols lurking in it - it never tries to "legitimize" itself with blatant intellectual soap-boxing - it's messages are often deliberately encoded.

Up in the cheap nosebleed seats I saw a few people who belonged to my demographic: many of us know that we should dress up to go to opera, but have no idea how to properly do it ( purple shirts and red ties and black leather jackets and ponytails ). Even with Cronenberg-love in the house, people could not help themselves from giggling at the lame dialogue, the puppet monkey in Brundle's telepod, or Brundle's "full monty" moment. If you are a fan of the film, just recall the incredulity you felt on hearing that this would be an opera, and then the acceptance that it could be really cool. Then imagine a dark empty stage and a chorus of singers performing as the voice of Brundle's computer, narrating about 10 minutes worth of narrative events from the film, and let your feelings of disbelief return. When Brundlefly visits a poolhall and rips the arm off of a local tough guy, a scene which is inflated from a movie gross-out shock to a full blown song where the victim closes the scene alone in a spotlight, I was reminded of the cast of the Simpsons staging their production of Tennessee Williams' Oh Streetcar! Someone next to me mumbled that he was waiting for the Sharks and the Jets to make their appearance.

What sucks about watching something bad is knowing all the work and talent that went into it. Although Shore gave the singers little to do, there were times when they delivered appreciable power from the vocal cords - it just wasn't harnessed into anything that made you feel. For a story about a cerebral guy who wants to free himself from "the flesh," the opera seemed to have liberated itself rather effectively from the emotions. I felt bad that people were up there working hard but failing to connect. They were like foot-soldiers being marched into cannon fire, brave but doomed.

Afterwards, we went to get a drink and I spotted someone I thought I knew at the entrance to the restaurant. I realized later that it was Howard Shore. I thought again about wartime defeats, only this time from the point of view of the generals who had to drink themselves to sleep after sending their men to their deaths. With bad reviews coming in from the Paris debut and now Los Angeles too, I hope the bartender mixed him a strong one.