A Little Bit of the Old Benjy Brit
During my annual Internet troll for concerts to go to this season I saw that the Pittsburgh Opera is doing Benjamin Britten's Billy Budd in the spring. I think this is great -- I've never seen all that many of the company's productions but I'm glad they're continuing their effort of the past couple of years to shake up their previously musty programming.
One thing that kind of throws me, though, is the graphic they're using to advertise the show:
Now, they're using this style to advertise all four of their productions this season, and while only The Magic Flute features few enough stabbings, bludgeonings, and/or suicides for that kind of graphical jauntiness to be thematically appropriate (some anti-Masonic characters do get destroyed by the sun at the end, but it's done in good cheer), at least most casual opera fans know at the outset of I Pagliacci or Romeo and Juliet that despite the candy-colored veneer of the season subscription booklet there are some stabbings and suicides on the way.
With Billy Budd, however, I'd be more concerned about the audience knowing what to expect. And when I see this ad, I don't expect a psychologically fraught moral drama played against the backdrop of the brutality of the early 19th-century Royal Navy. What I expect is more along the lines of a nautically themed Cool Cat short. And while that would be awesome in its own way, there's little in the actual opera that recalls the angular, shoddy Warner Bros. animation of the late sixties. Thus does the ad strike me as a recipe for confusion and disappointment.
Promotional quibbles aside, though, Billy Budd is one of my favorite operas and I'm happy the hometown opera company is staging it. The Herman Melville story of the same name that the opera's based on is worth reading too, along with the similarly philosophical but way more hilarious "Bartleby the Scrivener" that it's inevitably anthologized with.
One thing that kind of throws me, though, is the graphic they're using to advertise the show:
Now, they're using this style to advertise all four of their productions this season, and while only The Magic Flute features few enough stabbings, bludgeonings, and/or suicides for that kind of graphical jauntiness to be thematically appropriate (some anti-Masonic characters do get destroyed by the sun at the end, but it's done in good cheer), at least most casual opera fans know at the outset of I Pagliacci or Romeo and Juliet that despite the candy-colored veneer of the season subscription booklet there are some stabbings and suicides on the way.
With Billy Budd, however, I'd be more concerned about the audience knowing what to expect. And when I see this ad, I don't expect a psychologically fraught moral drama played against the backdrop of the brutality of the early 19th-century Royal Navy. What I expect is more along the lines of a nautically themed Cool Cat short. And while that would be awesome in its own way, there's little in the actual opera that recalls the angular, shoddy Warner Bros. animation of the late sixties. Thus does the ad strike me as a recipe for confusion and disappointment.
Promotional quibbles aside, though, Billy Budd is one of my favorite operas and I'm happy the hometown opera company is staging it. The Herman Melville story of the same name that the opera's based on is worth reading too, along with the similarly philosophical but way more hilarious "Bartleby the Scrivener" that it's inevitably anthologized with.
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home