Otello, starring . . .

Admittedly, opera has never been renowned for Great Acting, (capital-G, capital-A) in any sense. There's something about the effort it requires to learn how to Sing, with a capital-S, that just squashes whatever it is in the brain that's used to learn how to emote physically. It's like those experiments they do on guinea pigs. Your average guinea pig knows nothing more than eating and pooping and, occasionally, screaming at the top of its lungs because it isn't eating or pooping. Every so often a little scientist will come along that has been rejected by all the other little scientists, and in an effort to get back into the little scientist clique, he'll perform some variation of the frontal lobotomy on a guinea pig. Under the hopes that this will reveal some hitherto unrealized facet of human behavior that will let him back into the little scientist clique, he studies the lobotomized guinea pig and publish copious notes to astonish the world.

What inevitably happens, of course, is that the guinea pig will continue to eat and poop and scream, except it'll be all confused so that it'll eat its poop while screaming. Opera singers are sort of like that.

(Now that I read back over that, I realize of course that opera singers are absolutely nothing like guinea pigs, except in that they eat, poop, and scream a lot, and neither guinea pigs nor opera singers can act.)

Which brings me to how we went to Otello last Tuesday.

It was the Guy's second experience of opera, and for a marvel -- I really do have a brave boyfriend -- he wasn't put off (too much) by his first experience. Ariadne auf Naxos, while possessing that one trait that makes any opera a success -- it's short -- is not what one would call an entry-level opera. Richard Strauss is an acquired taste for most, rather like fugu and only moderately less lethal.

Otello, however, is opera on the grand, classic style. There are massive, lavishly dressed choruses. Massive, lavishly decorated sets. A massive, lavishly orchestrated score. Massive, lavishly dressed singers. It is, in every sense of the word, what a newbie comes to the opera house to experience: a visual spectacle, as well as an aural one. The Guy liked it.

In general, San Francisco Opera does a pretty good job with its productions, but no quality opera production is complete without one fatal flaw. It was only in the second act that I realized exactly what was going to go wrong with this one. The second act is when Iago starts working on Otello's feeble brain. It's a rapid transformation for the title character; Otello abruptly goes from being Triumphant Noble Lover Hero to being Agonized Jealous Tragic Hero. San Francisco's Otello instantly started staggering around the stage, Emoting.

"Oh my God," I thought, after twenty minutes of Stagger Here, Stagger There, Stagger Everywhere. "He took lessons at the William Shatner School of Acting."

The third act curtain rose on more Staggering. I waited breathlessly for Otello to take a single step that wouldn't actually hurl him into one of the set pieces, and almost suffocated before the curtain went down. As a climactic end-of-act, Otello is supposed to faint, unable to stand the emotional torment. Our Otello hiccuped his way down a staircase and twitched convulsively at the bottom with, I kid you not, one hand clutching at his breast and the other thrust up in the air: Lorne Green, to the life.

"Oh my God," I thought, as the curtain went down. "He got a Doctorate the William Shatner School of Acting."

In case anybody's wondering, he didn't improve noticeably in the last act.

Ignoring the irony of accusing any opera singer of overacting, particularly in a Verdi opera, I left the performance with an itching urge to send a note backstage. I even had the text of it worked out in my mind. "You sing good," it would have read, "but don't get acting tips from Star Trek." The tenor that played Otello was a Russian, specially imported for the purpose. Would it have been petty for me to be so disturbed by the acting in what snobs would insist is, after all, a musical production?

Yes. However, I've earned my musical snobbery badge; I graduated with a Masters from a conservatory, after all. Having proven myself qualified, I can now be one of the common folk, and nitpick with the best of them. After all, for me, opera without acting is like radio in drag. I have no desire to have sex with either of them.