#comicopera — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #comicopera, aggregated by home.social.
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Marissa and my MiL and I went to "Patience" today at the Gilbert and Sullivan Very Light Opera Company. I had forgotten how very pointy this one is; among the targets are:
* dukes
* poets
* the aesthetic movement
* moralizing poetry
* weird poetic pronunciations
* true love
* the British army's self-image
* men dressing in ways that impress other men, and assuming it's attractive to women !! (this might be a modern gloss but it's kind of explicitly there in the plot too)
* women getting old (I think I side with Sullivan on this, what the hell was Gilbert's hang-up)It gives me great joy to imagine W.S. sitting down and saying "today I have to write some bad poetry" and probably having to throw out the first couple versions as not bad enough.
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Musical Interlude: OK, this music is ultra-famous. Some folks know it's from an opera, Offenbach's "Orpheus in the Underworld." Few know it's an achingly funny comic opera that spoofs Greek mythology, and the romanticized tales of love therein. I saw a production a few years back that also played it as a satire of modern media culture, which actually works...there's a character called Public Opinion that scolds an unhappy couple for not staying together, which was played as a cable news reporter and her crew.
In this scene, the gods of Olympus are assembled in Hades for a party, and are entertained by an array of infernal spirits.
Anyway, as originally intended, here's the famous can-can from Offenbach's "Orpheus in the Underworld," performed by the Opera de Lyon.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=grtFa34EdgI
#MusicalInterlude #Offenbach #CanCan #OrpheusInTheUnderworld #ComicOpera