LA Opera’s Hercules vs. Vampires Mashes a Cheesy Monster Flick With Live Opera
Dorothy Chandler Pavilion (Los Angeles, CA)
If Game of Thrones and The Walking Dead had a three-way with Puccini, their lovechild would only be half as twisted as Hercules vs. Vampires, an insanely fun new film-opera hybrid from LA Opera that takes a cult fantasy flick (Hercules in the Haunted World, an epic 1961 sword-and-sandal cheesefest starring bodybuilder Reg Park) and transforms it into live opera. Here’s how it works: Whenever the actors projected on the silver screen open their mouths, you’ll hear their lines sung by a talented cast of singers from the Domingo-Colburn-Stein Young Artist Program, accompanied by a live 26-piece orchestra. Directed by the great Italian filmmaker Mario Bava, the film follows Hercules on a heroic journey to rescue his beloved from an army of bloodthirsty zombies and a fiendish mastermind of terror. The film is swaddled in glorious early-1960s Technicolor, and the atmospheric new operatic score by L.A.-based composer Patrick Morganelli provides the perfect accompaniment to Bava’s gorgeously gaudy world.
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