La Didone

by tristero

And now for something completely different…

I really thought, despite a highly successful run in New York, the Wooster Group’s La Didone would never be seen again. This morning, however, I learned that it will be performed at Redcat, the Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater in Los Angeles from June 11 through the 21st. If you have even the slightest interest in non-narrative/experimental/very cool theater, I strongly suggest you go. I was so amazed I saw it twice and I am by no means enamored of most Wooster Groop productions.

La Didone combines a performance of Cavalli’s 1641 opera about Dido and Aeneas with a re-enactment of Mario Bava’s sci-fi cult film, Planet of the Vampires (which, as Dennis will tell you, surely influenced Ridley Scott’s Alien). Somehow, it works – not as camp, not as some incomprehensible pomo hogwash, but rather as a weird kind of apocalyptic draama in which the experience of falling in love is likened to an infection by an alien life form. It’s heartbreaking and genuinely disturbing.The parallels between the opera and the movie, which seem to have nothing in common, are uncanny.

Also uncanny are the performances, especially mezzo-soprano Hai-Ting Chinn, who plays both Dido and one of the doomed members of the starship’s crew. The staging is also superb, with appropriately kitschy space suits and Baroque costumes – Neptune’s a hoot, as is Cupid – and a Ben Burtt-level of near-continuous electronic walla. (You do know who Ben Burtt is, right? Shame on you!)

Anyway, if you’re in LA go see it. You’ll either love it or come away convinced that whoever recommended you see La Didone is…not well.