It ain't over 'til the fat lady sings ... Brokeback Mountain's tragic lovers
Binoculars at the ready: an opera version of Ang Lee's camping classic Brokeback Mountain is in the pipeline. The New York City Opera has commissioned composer Charles Wuorinen to write a non-stop singing version of the 2005 weepie about the love affair between ranch hands Ennis del Mar (the late Heath Ledger) and Jack Twist (Jake Gyllenhaal).
Yesterday Wuorinen explained: "Ever since encountering Annie Proulx's extraordinary story I have wanted to make an opera on it." Not syntax that particularly raises hopes for the finished product, and one can't help but worry about the logistics of all those sheep.
Yet Brokeback: The Opera does seem a weirdly inspired idea, a near perfect marriage of source material and genre.
When you get that fit right, the rewards can be enormous, as Billy Elliot: The Musical testifies. When it's more of a mismatch, the results can be messy: the Toronto run of the musical version of The Lord of the Rings closed early. And the hobbits are quitting London next month, making the production one of the West End's most costly flops.
But what other combinations of movie and genre might work well? The Matrix: the ballet? The Silence of the Lambs as supper theatre? I Know What You Did Last Summer as panto? With all those "He's behind you's" it's halfway there already.
