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| The Bat / Austin Lyric Opera : 4 of 5 | |
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6.10.2008
7:08 AM | Link0 comments |
 When I first heard that Austin Lyric Opera was closing their season with a special "Keep Austin Weird" version of Strauss' Die Fledermaus (The Bat), I was pretty skeptical. I can understand the obvious temptation, since Austin is home to the world's largest urban bat colony, but I thought I would rather see the traditional opera, since I hadn't seen this piece before. I decided to go with a positive attitude with my pal Melinda, and the production was surprisingly wonderful! I was expecting to hear the original German libretto sung in Austin settings, but ALO joined forces with Esther's Follies comedy troupe to actually re-write the entire thing! So, everything was sung in English, with some of the most ridiculous (and hilarious) lyrics you can imagine. I'm pretty sure you won't hear warnings about bending over for the soap in prison in any other opera experience! Actually, that's my one complaint about the production - if this was someone's first opera, they've been a bit cheated out of the "real thing" (but the crowd certainly loved it all!). Strauss' waltz-filled music was wonderful and somehow appropriate to singing about bats filling the skies, getting drunk, and loving Luckenbach. The main action of the story takes place at a costume ball, and the party-goers were all Austin references, such as the capitol, the UT tower, hippies, rollergirls, Lance Armstrong, and even restaurants like the Mangia Godzilla and the Hyde Park Grill fork (I'm glad I've lived here long enough to recognize them!). Since this is a short opera, they extended the show by inserting local musical acts into the party - I got to enjoy a spoken word performance (with harmonica) by Wammo, which was fantastic, but still pretty weird in the middle of an opera! Finally, all of the performers were wonderful, especially the maid Adela, who's comic timing was incredible. The Bat was certainly a unique experience, but I'll be looking forward to a return to normalcy next season.
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