I woke up a second time at about seven this morning. I had the strangest dream. I rarely remember dreams - usually only a few times a year - but this one struck me as pretty strange. I think what I was seeing was maybe a community theater production, or perhaps a small regional production of Einstein on the Beach. The musicians and performers couldn't fit in the right places in the auditorium, so they kinda spilled out into the first several rows. Oddly enough, the only one of them that looked interesting at the time I later on realized was a winemaker in this magazine Dan's Mom had given me for Christmas, which is now in Sydney. [Julian, it's this one guy with a greying beard and a Lakers baseball cap, I think.]
However, the point of all this was that they'd morphed the entire opera into something completely different, presumably so that it wouldn't be "boring" or "intellectual". It seemed to play out as kind of an osso buco, er... what's that word... opera buffa? The house lights were up, the performers were doing weird audience participation schtick á la Cirque du Soleil, and the lyrics had been all changed to be kind of stupidly goofy. And while I was dreaming, I was just thinking to myself how v. annoyed I was that they'd taken all of the pleasure out of the performance for me.
So, yeah. Kinda strange. Anyhow, it's still one of my goals in life, to see a real production of EOTB. I've always been taken with the score, and I love the idea of the slowness of the production. I've only seen two Robert Wilson pieces, Music from the Knee plays [with David Byrne] and Monsters of Grace [with Phillip Glass], and what I loved about it was the glacial slowness of it all. On a related note, when I saw Matthew Barney's Cremaster 2, I thought it had some of the same characteristics... but then the projectionist at SFMOMA stopped the presentation because the bulb had been burned out the whole damned time. And there I was thinking that it was pretty cool to just have really slow music for ten minutes with no picture. D'oh!
