I have a weakness for bad science fiction; it's much funnier and less scary than good science fiction. When I heard that one of my favorite playwrights, San Gabriel Valley’s native son David Henry Hwang, was writing the libretto for an opera based on the classic sci-fi movie, The Fly, how could I resist?
Based on a short story by George Langelaan, the original 1958 color movie was written by James Clavell and set in French Canada. It spawned a sequel, the 1959 Return of the Fly, as well as the 1965 Curse of the Fly. In 1986, David Cronenberg directed and co-wrote (with Charles Edward Pogue) an updated version of The Fly with Howard Shore composing original music.
In the U.S. premiere of the opera The Fly at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, Cronenberg directs and Shore supplies the music supporting Hwang’s libretto. What could have been a campy, fun creation, or a dark, brooding, stylish, cautionary tale is instead a too-serious, icky mess—more revolting than the sight of a baboon turned inside out from a botched teleporting experiment.
For those unfamiliar with the story, a female journalist, Veronica, meets shy scientist Seth Brundle at a party. He tells her that his work will change the world as we know it and shows her his teleporting pods. His only problem: the teleporter doesn’t work with living things. After he finally successfully teleports a baboon, he tries it on himself, but he’s not alone in the teleporting pod. Unseen, a fly has joined him and becomes spliced into the genes of his reintegrated body, causing him to slowly turn into a giant fly.
Although Hwang and Cronenberg base their tale on the 1986 motion picture, the set gives a nod to the 1958 movie—the number 58 is prominently displayed, and the set design of the telepods and Denise Cronenberg’s fashion design are 1950s. This makes Ruxandra Donose’s Veronica seem less the liberated woman Geena Davis played and more the slutty career girl sleeping her way to the top. As Seth Brundle, Daniel Okulitch looks like a regular guy, while Jeff Goldblum had a quirky, slightly offbeat look that made his transformation into Brundlefly more believable. There IS something buggy about him from the beginning.
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