Tuesday, September 15, 2009

Sarah Palin: Opera A Capella

An opera about Sarah Palin?

Sarah Palin isn’t vice president. And she probably won’t ever be president. Heck - she’s not even a governor anymore.

But the Alaskan pol has achieved one measure of fame - someone’s written an opera about her.

“Say It Ain’t So, Joe,” a presentation by Guerilla Opera, opens Saturday at Boston Conservatory’s Zack Box Theater. The work is composer Curtis Hughes’ musical take on America’s favorite moose-hunting winker, you betcha. It focuses on that contentious - and sometimes comical - debate from October 2008 between Palin and Joe Biden, though the show also includes cameos from Hillary Clinton, Gwen Ifill, Diane Sawyer and, of course, the right-wing’s favorite Everyman, Joe the Plumber.


Betcha Joe Biden plays the hero in this opera when you consider this:

“My primary interest was the music,” Hughes said. “I was struck by the contrast of the two styles - Biden’s and Palin’s - and the music in their voices. Of course I have strong political sentiments, but this is not about my sentiments.”


This sounds like a yawner unless you are a Palin critic...

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Actually, the music is incredibly compelling and interesting. You can’t talk about new opera, and assume it’s going to sound like old opera. The sound world of Curtis’s music is derived from many, many styles from fusion Jazz to disjunctive contemporary classical music. The libretto/script is also extremely clever.