Now we know not to call “The Comet / Poppea” a mashup. That was the obvious expectation before Friday night’s premiere of Yuval Sharon’s latest operatic experiment with his company, the Industry. Sharon simultaneously pits a lasciviously immoral Venetian opera from 1643 with a new opera based on W.
E.B. Du Bois’ dystopian, proto-Afrofuturist short story from 1920.
On one half of a revolving stage at Geffen Contemporary at MOCA is an adaptation of Claudio Monteverdi’s “The Coronation of Poppea.” One of the earliest operas in the repertory, it remains one of the most luxuriantly sexy — an arresting purveyor of the pleasure of iniquity. The dazzling set is a gleaming white Baroque fantasyland.
On the other half is a 1920s New York restaurant filled with corpses. A comet has hit the city and the only survivors are Jim, a working class Black man, and Julia, a white socialite. The score is by George Lewis , who began as a jazz trombonist at the Assn.
for the Advancement of Creative Music to become one of America’s most impressively progressive and protean composers and scholars. The poetically soaring libretto is by Douglas Kearney. The ever-creaking set slowly turns, turns, turns.
One minute, you see Nero up to his nefarious business, exiling his wife and removing or killing any who would stand in the way of him marrying his lover, Poppea. The next minute, Jim and Julia, from different worlds, are painfully coming to terms with what it means to seemingly be huma.
