Fellowship of the Ring Extended Version (cont.)...

I'm back. The more substantially altered bits of Fellowship are those on the second disc, so I figured it deserved an entry of its own. Again, I'm hiding the commentary (chock full of spoilers) behind a cut.


( FOTR Extended Version: Disc Two )

I Come to Bury Caesar, Not to Praise Him...

Friday night was opera night for me, and I was excited about seeing Handel's Julius Caesar. I was ready for some political scheming and assassination. What I got was certainly the worst opera I've seen in the years I've subscribed.

First, the story was not of Caesar's assassination, but rather his campaign against Pompey in Egypt. Still, there should be room for conflict and romance and tragedy in this tale. Wrong. I knew I was in trouble when the opera opened with groups of Roman soldiers nancing about dance-fighting with one another. Now, I love camp enough to find this terribly amusing, but it didn't seem appropriate to the tone of the piece.

Some of the flaws of the production lie in the opera itself. The music is very similar in tempo and mood and the arias go on waaaaaay too long. This translates into utter tedium. Also curious was the fact that the actors very rarely directly interact with one another. Whether they are fighting or scheming or wooing, they do it past each other rather than with each other.

The rest of the flaws were with the production. All the men were dressed in period-appropriate garb except for the women who wore costumes that would not have been out of place in Dangerous Liaisons. Ah, but it's baroque opera, an acquaintance said, and the divas of that period did not want to seem dressed down, especially not on stage. Fine. But we are a contemporary audience and the director has the choice on how the production will look. I would think that aesthetic consistency would be more important than adherence to minutiae of how the show was originally staged.

The singing was adequate at best, ridiculous at worst. There was a fellow playing Cleopatra's brother who made me question is there still wasn't an opera mill somewhere turning out castrati. Except for the fact that he couldn't consistently maintain the falsetto he was singing in and his voice would slip into his more natural register.

The acting (and I don't expect much from opera) was like the most awful and excessive parody of acting that I have ever laid eyes on. It made me squirm in embarrassment for the cast. Did I mention that Cleopatra's brother wore a long robe, and he kept losing the armholes in the sides? Finally, he started reaching through the opening that ran down the midline of his body.

Just a nightmare. People were leaving before intermission. My friend and I left during intermission. All I can say is that the next two productions had better be fucking fabulous in order to make up for this ill-conceived debacle of a production.