La Vida Breve (Life is Brief)

USER (28Jun04): The music and the singing were fantastic,the production was appalling. It completely missed the point (read Lorca on Duende and you might find out something about the point it was meant to make). A sixth-form play group could have done better. The production was the equivalent of turning Picasso's Guernica into a tabloid press cartoon, turning King Lear into a Carry on film. There was no dignity, no seriousness, no trgedy- just farce and melodrama. In short, the production was a travesty, made worse by the fact that this opera is not available on dvd and that it is hardly ever performed in the UK. A complete waste of time and energy, a great disappointemnt. If it was meant to be a send-up, a spoof, rather than pure tragedy then why not bill it as such and we wouldn't have wasted our money? If you were at a loss as to how to stage it why not look at Langston Hughes's 1936 production of Blood Wedding in New York, done with lighting, shapes, IMAGINATION.