Altman Goes Opera

By Kari Geltemeyer in Arts & Entertainment on Dec 8, 2004 5:15PM

World premieres run amok in Chicago this week, with Sunday’s kick-off of the never-fully-produced Tennessee Williams play "One Arm" at Steppenwolf and the upcoming debut of director Robert Altman’s "A Wedding" at the Lyric Opera.

We’re particularly curious about this one, since the source material, Altman’s 1978 film of the same name, about a society wedding between a North Shore deb type and the son of an alleged Mafioso, wasn't exactly a smash hit. Altman himself admitted to the Tribune that “I don’t know much about opera,” but composer William Bolcom draws parallels with Mozart’s ever-popular "The Marriage of Figaro," which would be a pretty good place to start, what with the bickering and implied bed hopping and all. Plus it’s being presented in English with projected English supertitles, an enormous relief for those of us who’ve lost the ability to decipher our own mother tongue.

Altman probably didn’t help his cause much, though, when he grouched to the Tribune that he’s skeptical of its appeal to the traditional opera crowd:

"Because it's opera, most of these guys who are coming to the opera because they gave a lot of money to the company but have tin ears and don't know what's going on or whether it's a good opera or not," the director grumbles.

"They think they know too much. I think if you could grab 3,000 people at random from the city of Chicago and put them in the theater, you would have a smash hit."

Makes us wonder if adapting "Dr. T & The Women" might not have been the smarter choice—a bracing dose of naked Farrah in a fountain (note: most definitely NSFW) could be just what those opera types need to get more cultured up.

“A Wedding” runs at the Lyric Opera of Chicago from Dec. 11 through Jan. 21. Tickets $40–$170, still available for all ten performances.