Australian Great Big Opera is lots of sidesplitting fun
By Gus Kairupan
JAKARTA (JP): At the mention of Great Big Opera, you are forgiven for visions of extremely well-fed women bellowing on stage, their sizes belying a storyline saying they are dying from consumption, or that they are 14-year-old Japanese girls.
But think a bit more about the words, abbreviated GBOC, and you begin to suspect there is a tongue stuck firmly in cheek.
Grand Opera, yes, but Great Big Opera? Anyway, that's the name of the trio, comprising soprano (and contralto, and basso profundo, tenor, coloratura) Jon Watson, and the other 50 or so orchestra members whose playing was handled by Allan Walker and Greg Riddell, both sporting masses of braids on their heads.
Country of origin is Australia. Which also stands for a different brand of humor: earthy, racy, raunchy, sometimes vulgar but always sidesplitting.
It is perhaps not readily grasped by audiences here, who are soaked in American sitcoms when it comes to entertainment in English.
However, last Friday's performance at Gedung Kesenian Jakarta wasn't that steeped in down under antics, like a Bazza McKenzie technicolor yawn, say, or Jeannie Little dressed in the latest fashion material -- plastic garbage bags -- or gladdies pelted from the stage by Dame Edna Everage (is she still around?).
Still, it helps a bit to have been exposed to Australiana, though you don't necessarily have to have lived in Warwick, Queensland (population: 10,000 friendly people), where they have periodic eistedfodds (if you're Welsh, you'll know that it means singing and poetry contests) "and where I had to go on stage with that rotten sister of mine" (Watson).
It could have shocked some in the audience, but rest assured, he probably adores his sister -- after all, he is from the country where "bastard" is a term of endearment.
So what's GBOC all about?
Entertaining, of course, and the brand of entertainment they specialize in has won them accolades at such major international arts feasts as the Edinburgh and Adelaide Fringe Festivals, not to mention top theaters and tours to various countries, including Russia.
Some of the shows with which they have wowed audiences carry titles like A Great Big Soap Opera, Generation Y, Justapose and Pictures of an Exhibitionist.
Pop
From the titles alone, you know you are in for a session of having your ribs tickled. Although the program did not mention it, the show they put on in Jakarta would probably have been Justapose, that included such operatic stuff like the Valkyries, Carmen and Gianni Schicchi, and songs popularized by (and simulating) Elvis Presley, Dusty Springfield, Tom Jones, Peggy Lee, all sung by baritone Watson who is also a smooth mezzo soprano.
The funniest number was his recollection of his appearance (with the rotten sister) at the age when a boy's voice breaks.
Most of the numbers, though, were pop songs, and practically all of them from the 1960s.
"Richard Harris didn't know what MacArthur's Park was all about, and to this day it's still a mystery, probably the mystery of the century," Watson commented. Not true, of course.
A bigger riddle is what Bobby Gentry and Billy Joe McAllister threw off the Tallahatchie Ridge.
Both songs originated in the 1960s, so with Haight Ashbury at its zenith, making sense is one thing you need not bother about, right? Right. But that's neither here nor there.
The songs were a lovely stroll down memory lane, and I couldn't help singing along (or rather, murmuring along very softly) and being vastly pleased that I still remembered the words of practically all of them.
Some leaned a bit to the heavy side, like Glory Hallelujah, his truth is marching on; Elvis's truth, that is, because it closed the section of Elvis Presley songs.
The 1960s was also the period I first heard Peggy Lee's Sad Young Men, an elegy about gays in the 1960s, but hearing it again toward the end of the 1990s, it seemed to have lost a lot of poignancy, what with droves of men and women coming out of closets and making sure everybody knows about it.
Maybe I expected too much in that I thought we would be treated to a sizable dollop of opera.
Not the real heroine-going-bonkers type, or half-witted Nemorino chasing the village millionaires, but stuff that tears them to shreds.
Australians would be marvelous at that sort of thing -- they liked Lotte Lenya a lot, didn't they?
And anyway, there are operas and operatic characters that are practically begging to be sent up sky high.
I've always held that Violetta had a good chance of recuperating from that bout of consumption if Alfredo and his daddy Giorgio hadn't stormed into the room, already populated (beside the patient) by a maid and a doctor, to tell her it was all right for him, Alfredo, to marry her, Violetta.
Rattling good entertainment, though. Naturally. The three hold various music degrees from major Australian universities. But a voice that spans five octaves? Come, come!
Jon Watson et al will have to come back and do The Bell Song, or how about Queen of the Night?