Wednesday, October 10, 2007

A Riff Worthwhile?

Responding to my piece about bordello opera houses (link), my friend Penobscot recalls:

Loved the Prague State Opera House when I was there a few years ago. Saw Nabucco and Scott Joplin’s Treemonisha – one of the weirdest things I’ve ever seen: a bunch of white Czech people singing in badly accented English and pretending to be 19th century southern American blacks. I’m sure Joplin would have gotten a huge kick out of seeing his opera in that venue ….

I bet he did, and would have. Indeed, one of the things we saw at the Prague National Theatre was a sort of a "jazz opera" called A Walk Worthwhile, (link), staged by Miloš Forman--he of Amadeus fame. It's a high-spirited piece of good-natured cynicism left over from Communist times, performed with a talented cast (including, if I understand this right, one of the original co-authors, now 76 years old), requiring an actress with the agility to take off her underpants in a bathtub without losing her dignity. Aside from that, I couldn't make head or tail of it, but the locals assured us that that was how people felt in those days. Scott Joplin would have enjoyed that, too, I bet. And so also Penobscot.

[The co-author in the piece would be Jiří Suchý. The other co-author, Jiří Šlitr, died some years ago.]

No comments: