Even Insects Can Sing Arias.(Society and the Arts)(offbeat operas)

Byline: Elisa Mala

Unlikely inspirations bring new life to an old art.

Having hosted the likes of Tchaikovsky, Toscanini, Mahler and Stravinsky on its centuries-old stages, the Theatre du Chatelet in Paris is no stranger to superhuman talent. Yet on July 2, the venerable institution put forth another kind of unearthly display: the premiere of its latest opera, "The Fly." In this sci-fi tale, an ambitious scientist who tries to uncover the secrets of teleportation accidentally splices his genes with those of a housefly. However nontraditional the plot, the production was hardly fly-by-night. Placido Domingo (general director of both the Los Angeles and Washington National operas) conducted; acclaimed filmmaker David Cronenberg (who helmed the eponymous 1986 film remake) directed. Academy Award-winning composer Howard Shore, of "Lord of the Rings" fame, wrote the score, and Pulitzer Prize-nominated playwright David Henry Hwang ("M. Butterfly"), the libretto.

Aficionados had better get used to unconventional fare. Insects, teleportation and metamorphosis mark just the beginning of the unlikely subjects that opera companies are tackling. In their quest to make the genre more contemporary and draw younger audiences, they are embracing such quirky and occasionally down-market topics as the Manhattan Project ("Doctor Atomic"), Federico Garcia Lorca's latent homosexuality ("Ainadamar") and an American TV talk show whose guests throw chairs at one another ("Jerry Springer: The Opera"). Its host: a former Cincinnati mayor who resigned upon charges of soliciting prostitution. Not that there's anything new about crowd-pleasers. "The classic works that we love from the 1800s and 1900s were probably very relevant to those times," says Shore. But there was also less competition then. "It's obvious that there's a real drive to bring opera into a modern era, to keep it as an art form and not as a museum," says Cronenberg. "It's inevitable that people will be looking everywhere for inspiration."

In the past decade, children's tales such as "Alice in Wonderland" and "The Little Prince" and novels like George Orwell's "1984" and J. M. Coetzee's "Waiting for the Barbarians" have all been adapted for the operatic stage. Six years ago, British composer Nicholas Maw adapted "Sophie's Choice" for London's Covent Garden. For a September bow at the San Francisco Opera, Amy Tan wrote the libretto for "The Bonesetter's Daughter," based on her novel about a Chinese-American woman who uncovers an unsettling family secret (sidebar).

Movies have proved especially easy to appropriate. In 2003, Austrian composer Olga Neuwirth reincarnated David Lynch's 1997 neo-noir "Lost Highway." Robert Altman and Arnold Weinstein co-wrote the libretto for "A Wedding," based on Altman's 1979 film, for the Lyric Opera of Chicago in 2004.

To be sure, offbeat operas have surfaced before. Composer-librettist Philip Glass created an avant-garde trilogy in the 1970s and '80s that included "Einstein on the Beach," a five-and-a-half-hour piece with no intermission, and "Akhnaten," which explored the eponymous pharaoh's religious convictions. The centerpiece was "Satyagraha" a nonlinear account of ...