An opera based on an '80s remake of a '50s sci-fi classic. Conducted by Placido Domingo. Music by Howard Shore and directed by David Cronenberg, both of whom worked on 1986 classic. Currently playing in Paris and set to hit in Los Angeles in September. Well, that takes care of the what, when and who. All that leaves us is the how and the why why
why? The original story is pretty melodramatic, but opera? Color me ignorant, but I didn't realize until reading the
Guardian's review of
La Mouche (if only it was an opera about
La Bouche) that Broadway wasn't the only place good movies go to be turned into dancing and prancing.
Dancer In The Dark and
Lost Highway were also transformed into operas, and the New York City Opera hopes to give
Brokeback Mountain the same treatment in 2013. But hey, who cares about the source material if the final product is good, right? Well, it doesn't look like
La Mouche is knockin' 'em dead in Paris.
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Idolator
This weekend, a day after I witnessed someone dedicate a karaoke song to Jesus, I went to Carousel Cinemas here in Syracuse and saw the Met's recent production of John Adams' Doctor Atomic. It might seem a little sacrilegious to watch opera at a movie theater, but the staging worked fairly well, since the scale was roughly the same, the music was well-recorded and played loud, and the HD images were immediate and live-feeling. (Though there were too many zooms for my taste.) Well-received gambles like this are a staple of the modern classical music industry, which is doing relatively well, though like everything else it has been hit by the financial crisis. But could some of its innovations be imported to the music biz as we know it?
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A board member at the Metropolitan Opera has purchased $500,000 worth of prime seats for the upcoming run of John Adams' new opera Doctor Atomic so they can be sold to the curious but cash-strapped for only $30 a pop. Doctor Atomic is set in New Mexico in the summer of 1945 and it tells the story of J. Robert Oppenheimer and the creation of the a-bomb through song. This is awesome for many reasons, not the least of which the fact that $30 a ticket for a full-on opera is a way better New York culture deal than, say, $30 for a ticket to any show at the awful-in-every-way Manhattan venue 
