They Swat Flies, Don't They?

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Mes petites punaises:

As if the Bush administration hasn’t given Europeans enough American criminal behavior to complain about, the U.S. recently heaped yet another affront on this poor continent—in the form of The Fly, an insufferable new opera based on David Cronenberg’s 1986 remake of the 1958 classic schlock horror movie.

Perhaps my bad reaction stems partly from having recently seen the video of a 2005 Live from Lincoln Center presentation of Leonard Bernstein's Candide, and The Fly therefore suffers by such on-the-heels operatic comparison. (I can say now with all honesty, "I know Bernstein’s Candide, and Fly, sir, you are no Bernstein’s Candide.") It's not that simple, though. The real problem here is that no one, though heaven knows how many umpteen opportunities must certainly have arisen, thought to suggest that an opera based on The Fly is just, well, wrong.

Think about celebrated past musical stage adaptations: Man of La Mancha was based on the work of Cervantes; Kiss Me Kate and West Side Story drew from Shakespeare; Fiddler on the Roof from the tales of Sholem Aleichem; and the inspiration for Bernstein's Candide was, of course, the master satire by the great Voltaire. And though Victor Hugo and T.S. Eliot surely turn in their graves over the abominations of Les Miz and Cats, even those travesties of the stage were given a starting chance based on the quality of their source material. But to base an opera on a Vincent Price B-movie? Or rather, a remake of a Vincent Price B-movie!? You don’t have to know more about The Fly than that to know that even throwing in a leggy Ann Miller to hoof a steamy version of Cole Porter's "It’s Too Darn Hot" — or raising Maria Callas from the dead to sing "L'altra notte in fondo al mare" — wouldn’t convince a homosexual theater major on a good hair day that this idea had legs. There’s just no other way to state it: This mosca ain’t Tosca.

The Fly’s music by Howard Shore (best known as the award-winning composer for such high-brow box-office boffo as The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King), never belies its Hollywood roots. The film-length opera is one long Hobbit adventure score, without an aria to be heard. And lacking any melodic verse, the players simply belt out a rambling dialog in operatic sing-song. You really haven't suffered in a theater seat until you’ve endured the repetitive sprechgesang of lines like "All hail the new flesh! The new flesh has arrived!" and an adolescent chorus chanting an explanation of how the lead character (whose hailed new flesh transforms him into half-annoying-human/half-annoying-insect) is learning to compensate for the leprous melting away of his fingers by sucking up his food and vomiting it back up as an unpleasant liquid—which, come to think of it, is exactly what I wanted to do with the pre-theater croque monsieur I’d consumed (in the traditional chewing-and-swallowing human way) for lunch.

Cronenberg designed the set, which with its high-tech "teleportation pods" (by which the story's hero mistakenly commingles his DNA with a housefly) and its grim grayness successfully confers upon the theatergoer’s emotions the director’s distinctive, depressive cinematic mood, and the 1950s-style costumes (by Cronenberg’s sister Denise) encourage the imagination to drift back in time and yearn even more for Eisenhower-era musical theater, a reverie broken only momentarily by the brief frontal nudity of the story’s protagonist after he sheds said threads to leap in and out of the set's genetically destructive machinery. (Thank God lead tenor roles requiring nudity weren't offered back when Pavarotti was looking for work between snacks!)

Among the program credits' big names is Placido Domingo's, as The Fly's musical director, although the sight of the crown of the famous tenor’s head poking up from the orchestra pit as he conducted provided a less-thrilling brush with celebrity than my chance collision a few weeks ago with Anthony Bourdain (or maybe just his doppelganger) when I took a short-cut through an alley and tripped over the chain-smoking chef as he sat enjoying a cigarette amidst the fetid dumpsters behind a schmancy Champs Elysées restaurant. If Domingo's intention was to drown out the voices of the cast by sheer volume, he succeeded; I don't follow celebrity gossip enough to know if Domingo is known as a temperamental sort of fellow, but supertitles projected above the players in English along with their French translation lead me to imagine that the show's director found it easier to order up the English supertitles than to risk a temper tantrum by suggesting that the conductor tone the musicians down a notch so that the words the performers wailed could be discerned.

I know this curmudgeonly review is a break from the subject matter of my usual intolerant rants, but I offer it up as a warning to anyone looking for diversions when The Fly makes its U.S. debut in Los Angeles come September. If you don’t heed my advice and save yourself the cost of a ticket, I will have no sympathy when you cry, in the immortal, squeaky (and ultimately fruitless) last words from the original 1958 movie version, "Help me! Heeeeelp meeeeeee!"

Jusqu'à ce que la grosse dame chante,

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