Eeeevilllll!

My daily evil quota usually involves listening to the soothing sounds of Morbid Angel or Sextrash or watching the Barrier Kult Horde's fabulous skate video. However, friday night my ladyfriend said that she had an idea for something way out of the ordinary. I was all ears.

Imagine my suprise when she said that we were going to the opera! Yup, we ended up attending the first night of the Vancouver Opera's production of Charles Gounod's "Faust", the dark tale of a man who sells his soul to the devil in exchange for eternal youth.

I was a bit hesitant because I've never really been a fan of opera, but I've been very wrong before so I figured that I should give it a shot. As it turned out, Faust was a wicked production in the true sense of the word. For starters, the set was very cool and, interestingly, kept bringing to mind 2001: A Space Odyssey. Obviously, the music was the focus of the production and it was top-notch. Who doesn't enjoy witnessing the power of a finely-tuned orchestra? Only a fool, my friend. The eardrum-shattering falsetto arias that I was dreading never materialized and since the songs were in French (rather than Italian like most traditional operas) I could sort of follow what was being said without reading the subtitles (are they called superiortitles if they're projected above the stage?). And talk about dark! Now, I like dark, but director Nicholas Muni was not fooling around... we're talking blood pacts, a raped nun, a murdered baby, and a suicide by hanging. I even thought that there was a romantic subplot with a distinct modern-day twist underway until I was enlightened to opera's curious habit of sometimes casting women to play male characters. "But wasn't Siebel a girl?" People tell me that there's no such thing as a dumb question, but you wouldn't know it by the laughs that were had at my expense.

So what can I say? If I liked the opera, you might too. Check it out if you have a chance.