Am
I the only one utterly fascinated by the notion of Cronenberg’s The Fly
making one further transformative leap, this time to the opera stage? I can’t
be. How can there not be an audience for this, or at least for second and
third-hand news of the project? The more I hear about this production, the more
I envision it as a perversely magnificent marriage of art old and new. Truly,
it’s a little diamond delivered from Canada, by way of Paris.
Today Canadian paper The Globe and Mail had this juicy tidbit, courtesy of
Daniel Okulitch, the man behind Seth Brundle’s stage incarnation. “One of
the things I’m doing in Paris is being fitted for the prosthetics for my
gradual transformation [into the fly creature]. And there are telepods and
smoke and teleportation and videos of exploding baboons.” Videos of exploding baboons! If you can envision the voice Kyle MacLachlan used to express Dale Cooper’s first respect and awe for the Douglas Fir, that’s exactly how I’m hearing that phrase in my head.
Like that? How about this: “…it’s been intimated that because part of
the staging will involve me being on wires, we might be doing some of that –
just to see what I’m capable of, being on wires while singing.“
Other tantalizing details peer out amid the article’s discussion of operacraft.
For one, “choruses of scientists, ghosts in computers and the singing
voice of technology are also written into the score” and then with respect
to the love triangle between penis-dropper Seth Brundle, plain penis Stathis
Borans and journalist Veronica Quaife, there’s “audiences shouldn’t expect
the work to be a romance at the expense of spectacle.” As if we’d ever expect that.
Now, who wants to contribute to the ‘fly Russ to Paris for the premiere’ fund?