By Daniel Buckwalter
Opportunists meet their prey on a busy stage for one more night of delightful comedy that includes playful sexual innuendo, a handful of rubes, an alien monster and wonderful singing.
The occasion is Eugene Opera’s production of Acis & Galatea, George Frederic Handel’s two-act pastoral opera reimagined by stage director Patrick Hansen. It opened to a packed house Friday at Springfield’s Wildish Community Theater and concludes its two-day run on Saturday, May 21, at 7:30 p.m.
It’s a fun opera, and I encourage everyone to see it. And get some popcorn for the movie.
Hansen takes Acis & Galatea to Italy in the late 1950s where the immortal movie goddess Galatea (soprano Camille Ortiz) is on holiday trying to be incognito with her new young love, the rising film star Acis (tenor Terrence Chin-Loy).
Galatea is the self-indulgent film star personified. She’s the queen, and she knows it. People flock to her and study her every move, wanting to glow in her radiance. She can be dismissive of the adoration (“Hush, ye warbling choir,” she sings in the first act), yet she revels in it, too.
Acis is fastened to Galatea so as to establish his own career, yet there is a sexual vibe and a tenderness between the couple that’s displayed at the end of the first act (“Happy, happy we!”). They are enchanted with each other in a strange way.
They are accompanied throughout by their streetwise agent Damon (Timothy McCoy) and chased relentlessly by a hustling, in-your-face member of the paparazzi (Esteban Zúñiga Calderón), who may lack etiquette behind the camera but is well paid by Damon to get the “candid” shots of the two lead characters. He’s useful to Damon.
From the start, we are introduced to the other characters, ordinary people with their own lives, as they randomly walk the town square and stop at a cafe.
There’s the priest (Dylan Bunten), the sultry Fellina (Naomi Castro), the dim-witted married American couple whom I imagine hail from a newly developed 1950s suburb in the lower Midwest (Saori DeBruyn and Easton Marks) as well as the waiter, Aharon Melloul, who is resigned to endure it all while pouring wine and cleaning up messes.
Finally, there is Polyphemus (bass Ben Brady), the alien monster and the villain of the B movie by the same name. In the second act, he makes a grand entrance at the screening of the movie and instantly steals the thunder, frightening the others with his supernatural powers.
Polyphemus is a terror who, through some basic education, manages to enchant Galatea, Fellina and the female American tourist.
In the end, however, he kills a jealous Acis, much to the sadness of everyone (though Galatea does take a moment to touch up her makeup). Then Galatea resurrects Acis and becomes the heroine Goddess. Everyone kisses the back of her hand.
Is any of this real? Was this an elaborate ploy by opportunists for their own benefit? Does any of this make sense?
Find out tonight in the final performance of Acis & Galatea. It is a fun opera.
(Tickets available online at eugeneopera.org)
