The Un-Gay Crowd
May. 28th, 2005 12:33 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
drscottOn Thursday I got an email from Artsopolis, a most excellent South Bay arts organization that runs an online service on arts events in Silicon Valley. They also have an email list roughly equivalent to TKTS in New York, offering half-price tickets to performances of the week. This week I spotted a rare Pocket Opera event in San Jose (they're usually up in SF), Offenbach's Carnival in Venice.
The Pocket Opera is a Bay Area institution created and driven by one man, Donald Pippin, who has the kind of eccentric focus required to gather together a troupe of performers and dreamers to make season after season of small-scale shows happen. The "operas" are English translations of scaled-down operas (for example, the "Council of Ten" in the original became the "Council of Five" in Pippin's version.) By keeping staging and cast numbers to a minimum, the troupe can perform the Reader's Digest versions of grand operas as well as operettas.
The Montgomery Theater in San Jose was an ideal space for them. We got there early enough to get prime seats in front, which was worth it to enjoy the comic mugging of the villain Malatromba, played by Michael Mendelsohn, who (the program notes point out) won a prize on The Gong Show. Somewhere between Three Stooges and Gilbert & Sullivan. Also amusing was an Andrew Morgan, a Nathan Lane-ish pocket bear, and Mark Hernandez, a behr with his own website.
Mark Hernandez
They'll be doing a performance of the same piece on Sunday, May 29 at 2 pm at the Presentation Theater, USF; we paid $15 and the upcoming performance is "pay as you can."
While we missed Gay Day at Great America, we already have tickets to see GA as part of the upcoming square dance convention, so the news that some of the rides would not be open was enough to keep us from going.
The Pocket Opera is a Bay Area institution created and driven by one man, Donald Pippin, who has the kind of eccentric focus required to gather together a troupe of performers and dreamers to make season after season of small-scale shows happen. The "operas" are English translations of scaled-down operas (for example, the "Council of Ten" in the original became the "Council of Five" in Pippin's version.) By keeping staging and cast numbers to a minimum, the troupe can perform the Reader's Digest versions of grand operas as well as operettas.
The Montgomery Theater in San Jose was an ideal space for them. We got there early enough to get prime seats in front, which was worth it to enjoy the comic mugging of the villain Malatromba, played by Michael Mendelsohn, who (the program notes point out) won a prize on The Gong Show. Somewhere between Three Stooges and Gilbert & Sullivan. Also amusing was an Andrew Morgan, a Nathan Lane-ish pocket bear, and Mark Hernandez, a behr with his own website.
Mark Hernandez
They'll be doing a performance of the same piece on Sunday, May 29 at 2 pm at the Presentation Theater, USF; we paid $15 and the upcoming performance is "pay as you can."
While we missed Gay Day at Great America, we already have tickets to see GA as part of the upcoming square dance convention, so the news that some of the rides would not be open was enough to keep us from going.
