Danny-Come-Lately

As I am, generally speaking, not as interested in attending live performances of new works as I am in hiding in my dank troll-cave and shunning all joy, I missed the premiere performances, right here in New Haven, of TIMBERBRIT, a new opera by Jacob Cooper about a fictional reunion between Justin Timberlake and Britney Spears. I mean not only had I seen the flyers around town, I think like Ingram Marshall was in line in front of me at the coffee shop one day and he was telling me how excited he was about the piece and STILL I did not go. Well now that it's been all over NPR and all the HOT MUSIC BLOGZ I'm jumping on the bandwagon and watching this video of "Worst Fantasy" and kind of digging it:Mellissa Hughes TEARS UP this aria, which was apparently composed by slowing actual Britney Spears music down to an excruciating dirge, and this video is pretty well put-together too. So it looks like I missed out. ON THE OTHER HAND, I watch this video from the semi-staged piece and am ever-so-slightly annoyed. Not by the musical performances—look! it's our favorites, like there's Ted Hearne as Justin Timberlake, and isn't that Trevor Gureckis on keys? why yes I believe it is—but there's something naggingly annoying about the failure to even semi–stage direct this semi-staging. Wouldn't the logical maneuver here be for the singers to face each other with the microphones in their hands, as one would do in any he-said she-said pop duet? And then TH wouldn't have to hang on the mic stand like, and everybody could inhabit their character, and the idiom, a little more fully? (C'mon people I can't do everything for you.) So I'm not totally sure I could've endured a whole evening of such semi-staging combined with such aggressively, awesomely unbearable music. (Like DOOM METAL with POP BELTING?) Though apparently there's a fully staged version coming? Which could be awesome? Keep ya posted. Via I think Matt Marks—who has helpfully written in, since I posted this with the actual spelling of Mellissa Hughes's name (double L as in mellifluous, not single L as in melisma), and the correct URL to his webpage. Tune in next week, when I talk about how I missed the free New Haven premiere of Chris Cerrone's apparently awesome operatization of Calvino's Invisible Cities, because I didn't feel like it that day. God I am horrible.