Was opera ever truly the highest form of cultural expression? I mean, and no offense to my two opera loving friends, does a tale of a malformed dwarf’s unrequited love of the peasant girl which is thwarted by the black-hearted prince really represent high culture? I don’t know, I think the best of movie of the last ten years was Iron Man.

What’s my point? Glad you asked. I nearly forgot it. Oh yeah. Opera and its retarded sibling the musical seem now to the last refuge of vapid ideas.

Witness Brokeback Mountain, the Opera. This follows news of Gore’s An Inconvient Truth, the Opera. These two gems are on the slate for production.

Under duress, I saw Miss Saigon. It was somewhere towards the second act when the Vietnamese pimp was rhaposdizing something to the effect that the main character would make a great new whore, that it dawned on me – Operas really suck. And they don’t suck merely in the sense that they are awful. They actively suck – sucking your precious life-force; sucking coherent thoughts into simplistic lyrics and sucking culture into a costumed farce.

I cannot wait for You Don’t Mess With the Zohan.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 10th, 2008 at 8:01 am and is filed under Entertainment. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.