As the members of Monty Python’s Flying Circus were fond of saying, “And now for something completely different” — or at least different for Los Angeles Opera.
Thursday was B-movie-becomes-opera-night at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, as a company more commonly associated with Carmens and Toscas, presented Patrick Morganelli’s surprisingly engrossing operatic adaptation of Mario Bava’s muscle-bound, 1961 sword-and-sandal epic, Ercole al centro della terra— aka Hercules in the Haunted World, Hercules at the Center of the World, and now Hercules vs. Vampires.
Mario Bava (1914-1980) has become something of a cult director who cranked out low-budget, sword-and-sandal fantasies at the same time that directors such as Federico Fellini, Michelangelo Antonioni, and Luchino Visconte were creating La Dolce Vita, Rocco and His Brothers, and La Notte. Bava was a bit like Italy’s Ed Wood (minus the angora fetish). His films featured mythological muscle men, classically draped damsels in distress, and lurid psychedelic lighting. His filmography definitely fits into the camp camp.
The great surprise Thursday, one that caught the Rocky Horror Picture Show crowd off guard, was that Hercules vs. Vampires is not a piece of camp entertainment; well, 80 percent of it isn’t. Skillfully edited down from 91 minutes to 74, the result is a thoroughly entertaining piece of mythic Greek opera drama. That’s fascinating when you consider the source and the fact that 413 years separate this and the first performance of Claudio Monteverdi’s mythically inspired trip-to-Hades opera La Favola D’Orfeo (“The Legend of Orpheus”).
The project, which was the brainchild of Opera Theater of Portland, began for Morganelli in 2009 when he applied for the job of creating an operatic version of Hercules in the Haunted World. The only problem was Morganelli, who had spent almost his entire compositional career penning music for television and film, had never composed an opera and knew next to nothing (he admitted in a pre-concert talk) about writing for the voice! Nevertheless, he got the job, and he took it seriously. The result was unveiled in May 2010 to generally favorable notices and great word-of-mouth.
Determined not to let his creation gather dust, Morganelli, with a “why not?” attitude, proposed the idea of staging the piece to L.A. Opera. And to his amazement, they agreed. Determined not to let his creation gather dust, Morganelli, with a “why not?” attitude, proposed the idea of staging the piece to L.A. Opera. And to his amazement, they agreed.
“In Hollywood you can never believe anything anyone says in a meeting,” he told his pre-concert audience. “But when these guys said they wanted to do it, they actually meant it. That was a new experience for me.” Over the course of a year and a half, Morganelli went from being a little-known player in Hollywood to the composer of an opera that was to be presented at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion.
So, on Thursday night a cast of nine young singers, members of the L.A. Opera’s Domingo-Colburn-Stein Young Artists Program, assembled themselves below a massive screen, along with a 26-member orchestra under the direction of Christopher Allen, and set sail for Hades.
From its sonorous opening in the timpani accompanied by the singers imitating a Greek chorus, it soon became clear that this was not a spoof. And while Morganelli may not be the most original composer, he is a skilled craftsman who knows how to steal from all the right sources.
To depict the above-ground realm of men, Morganelli incorporates an orchestral background flavored with a Hollywood brand of French Impressionism. For the action sequences, he draws heavily on the film scores of John Williams and Bernard Hermann’s Journey to the Center of the Earth and Vertigo. There’s even a nod to Prokofiev and the “Battle on the Ice” from Alexander Nevsky.
For the sequences that take place in the shadowy realm of Hades, Morganelli shifts musical gears and incorporates a more modernist vocabulary with an abundance of fixed-tone instruments. It references composers such as Luciano Berio along with intergalactic vocal lines reminiscent of Gyorgi Ligetti’s Atmospheres.
As the super-buff, English body-builder Reg Park appears on screen as Hercules, his voice is given nearly equal heft by baritone Kihun Yoon. His nemesis, the evil Lycos, is played on screen by that suavest of villains, Christopher Lee, and sung by bass-baritone Nicholas Brownlee.
As the action begins, Lycos has cast a spell over Hercules’ true love, Dianara (soprano Summer Hassan), causing her to drift into a zombie-like netherworld. To rescue her, Hercules must secure a Golden Apple from the darkness-dwelling Hesperides; enter Hades; cross a river of lava; defeat a monster; steal a magic stone; and return to the surface — standard Greek superhero stuff.
There are, of course, complications, most notably when Hercules’ sidekick, the ever-amorous Theseus (played by blond Adonis, George Ardisson, and sung by tenor Frederick Ballentine), falls in love with Pluto’s favorite daughter, Persephone (mezzo-soprano Lacy Jo Benter) and romances her out of Hades.
Finally, Hercules defeats Lycos, along with a cadre of creepy walking-dead types, by up-rooting and chucking massive stones at them.
It sounds like an absurd combination, but it’s no more challenging than the plotlines that confronted Monteverdi or Offenbach, Cocteau, or Philip Glass, who was the first to create a brand new opera over the framework of a classic film.
Perhaps the most important aspect of Hercules vs. Vampires is what it says about L.A. Opera and its newfound willingness to stretch the operatic envelope. That process will continue with its next project, Dog Days by David T. Little and Royce Vavrek. It will open June 11 and inaugurate a collaboration with the California Institute of the Arts at its downtown REDCAT theatre.
Meanwhile Hercules vs. Vampires will receive three more performances: 7 and 10 p.m. April 25 and 2 p.m. April 26. Tickets are $24-$46, quite a discount.