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COPYRIGHT 2007 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
It was a clear and cool Friday evening in Manchester, England, the streets still full of summer light at twenty minutes past seven. In front of me, in an orderly queue that stretched down the pavement in front of the Palace Theatre, were two teen-age boys wearing T-shirts and jeans. They were engaged in a comic routine: after glancing at the theatre's marquee, they would look at each other and repeat a carefully stressed mantra, "We are going to an OP-er-ah, an OP-er-ah." When I asked the boys why they were going to an OP-er-ah, one, lunging forward and placing himself in front of his friend, as if there were television cameras trained on him, replied, "It's Damon out of Blur, innit?"
It was, in part. Damon Albarn, the thirty-nine-year-old musician and lead singer of the British band Blur, who already has a fairly elaborate resume for a pop star, wrote the score for the opera "Monkey: Journey to the West," which was having its debut run in Manchester. Getting teen-age pop fans into an opera house isn't easy, but Albarn and his collaborators--the graphic artist Jamie Hewlett and the director Chen Shi-Zheng--have done a remarkable job of making an imposing art form accessible, funny, even slightly crude. The opera, which was commissioned by the Theatre du Chatelet, in Paris, where it will be shown in September, is based on a sixteenth-century Chinese novel by Wu Ch'Eng-en about a bratty monkey king who seeks enlightenment (and immortality, the egomaniac) by providing protection for a monk who needs to get to India and back unscathed. To Albarn's credit, the score is neither an aggregate of pop songs that people already know nor an attempt to garner highbrow bona fides through imitations of the classical canon. Like the opera itself, a delightful alloy of martial art, acrobatics, and cartoons, Albarn's score--which features several arias--is a hybrid that mingles movie-soundtrack ambience and goofy sound effects with the repetitive fecundity of modern composers like Steve Reich. There is even a catchy song about...
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