Parsifollies

Is opera all about artiface? Or is the suspension of disbelief just the price we pay to listen to great music while we see a play? I mean, these people are SINGING, and you'd have to be stubborn not to acknowledge that that's a little weird.

In a "fun" opera--i.e. one in which the tunes are catchy--the artiface seems to heighten the sense that the world is full of possibility and that human foibles are things of beauty. In a "serious" opera--for instance, the non-hummable Parsifal, which we saw at the LA Opera last night--the unnaturalness of the stage conceit seems more to suggest that we are viewing somethig non-human, abstract, allegorical. I kept picturing a production set in outer space.

Of course, that might have been partly because of the entirely blue-white stage design, whose most distinctive feature was the repeated 10-minute-long descent of an enormous glowing sesame bagel. There were also a vampire, a mummy, and a zombie-child, as well a a garden (composed in typical SoCal fashion of a few strategically placed silver versions of birds of paradise) full of magical seductresses, each of whom wore a nice, simple, Modern Bride-type wedding dress, a wimple, and carried a little ax. No wonder Parsifal was confused.

Anyway, it was an Event, and I have to go atone now, or I'll never be able to reuinite the spear with the grail.