Yeah, so I've just got back from Paris after seeing this on Tuesday.
Short version: It's great and well worth your time if you get a chance to go to one of the nights in LA.
Longer version: There's a good review
over on AICN by a guy who goes into a lot of details as to how the piece was set out etc, so I won't go over them again here, but I will say I enjoyed it a bit more than he seemed to and point out a few things not mentioned there that I liked.
The set design. Cronenberg has done well with the
mise en scene. Set dressing is kept clean and simple, yet is obviously incredibly expensive. It's mostly a one-set piece but there are whole banks of Hydraulics which smoothly run in the background to instantly change the set from Brundle's Dockside loft, to a dive bar, to a newspaper office as required. There are a bank of screens on Brundle's control panel and on each pod which are used to good effect, sometimes playing animations whilst displaying text that echoes the plot at other points. Also, for people (like me!) who find it hard at times to follow words whilst they're being sung in Soprano there was also a subtitling device hanging above the set which showed the lyrics in real-time in both English and French.
As with AICN's man, I'm not hugely knowledgeable about the intricacies of opera but I'm not a total heathen either. Shore's score and Hwang's lyrics had some nice recurring motifs that the kids could hum after the fact, so that part was fairly successful for me. I enjoyed the performance of Ruxandra Donose, the soprano, whose character holds the show together for large parts of the running time. Also, Placido Domingo seemed to be having a rum old time conducting, so that was also pleasing.
The effects were well done. Obviously the constraints of the stage show meant that real-time on-stage fly transformation was unlikely but Denise Cronenberg and her team did great work under these constraints. There's a pretty good baboon puppet in early scenes and nice practical effects on the Arm-wrestling/arm-break scene. Brundle's transformation into Brundlefly was delivered via a montage of each stage of his transformation. The montage is held together by the chorus and the aforementioned video screens which detail each stage and there's quick-fire backstage make-up to transform Daniel Okulitch (and occasionally a stunt stand-in) into Brundlefly in around 6 stages. There's also an inside-out version of Brundle at the end, which I'm unable to report on as I was sitting exactly
exactly in the one seat of the Theatre where I couldn't quite see it. It looked good in my head, though. It also meant my girlfriend was unable to see Okulitch's wang, but I caught a glimpse and felt sufficiently inferior, so it's just as well she didn't.
I've got the official programme, which is quite a nice little book which shows some make-up test work, backstage photos, a plot synopsis by Hwang, an interview with Howard Shore and a whole load about the history of the Fly story from the 1958 story onwards. It's nearly all in French, though, but I can stick some scans together if anyone's interested or if anyone has any questions about any part of the production in particular or even if anyone want's to know where to get a nice sandwich in Paris (SPOILER: everywhere) I'll hopefully be able to answer.
