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Agreed.
Wooster Group’s Sci-Fi mashup of Cavalli opera La Didone offered little sense of transcendental satisfaction for the die hard opera lover (of which I am one!). And really the whole conflation felt gratuitous. But as sheer entertainment…I had a great time!
First off RedCat feels the perfect spot for this kind of hyperactive performance. Wooster really makes the most of all the technology available. The sound is amped and so are the cast, ready at any moment to take one for team Wooster. Probably my favorite performance was Scott Shepard as sir Piggy. He ran around snorting and grunting executing one prat fall after another, all the while clinging to his ukulele. When at last he is shot down, he belly flops onto a table hard-on side up. Very Conanesque. Lots of redheads in this troop!
Speaking of which, I found redhead King Jarbas’s counter tenor not believable. When he does finally rest in his proper register you get an idea of his true tone, but straddling the heights just sounded scratchy to me. Dido and Aeneas carry the heft of the singing well, seemingly not distracted by their space counterparts. The music direction was superb with an every-once-in-a-while achievement of serendipity between space banter and opera phrasing.
I found myself pondering why those tables didn’t just roll off the stage, a lot. Probably not what LeCompte had in mind for take away experience. It did leave me hankering to re-listen to my first Dido experience, Jessye Norman. But that was in Paris at the Opéra Comique and for a committed opera devotee, that was Oooh La La Sublime. — Nancy Cantwell
