More than two decades after creating an ick factor with "The Fly," David Cronenberg and Howard Shore are trying to make it sing.
Cronenberg, the acclaimed film director ("Dead Ringers," "A History of Violence"), said he doesn't like returning to previously trodden creative ground. But he's breaking his rule in a big way with a new Los Angeles Opera production based on his 1986 sci-fi horror film.
"The Fly," with a score by three-time Oscar winner Shore ("The Lord of the Rings"), is the opera debut for both Cronenberg and Shore, who had written the music for the film.
Also on board are librettist David Henry Hwang (Tony- winning author of "M. Butterfly"), Oscar-winning production designer Dante Ferretti ("Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street") and L.A. Opera artistic director Placido Domingo, who will conduct and has helped bring new operas to L.A. before — such as the Julie Taymor/Elliot Goldenthal collaboration "Grendel."
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Commissioned in 2005 by Domingo for the Los Angeles Opera, the seven-performance run of "The Fly" begins Sunday at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion after an early-summer engagement at the Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris.
The Paris notices were mixed. Though leads Daniel Okulitch and Ruxandra Donose earned praise, French critics took a few swats at the piece as a whole.
"(It) confirmed that cinema and theater, above all opera, are two very different arts," sniffed Le Figaro, and Le Monde concluded that the work "doesn't fly."
But Cronenberg — who said he isn't about to hang up his camera for this new medium — is undeterred, noting that the experience has been a joyful romp through a new tool box.
"It was a massive learning experience," the director said. "Once you accept that you're doing stage … there are many things you get that you can't do in film."
Unlike Shore, 61 — an avid opera-goer who said elements of opera have been working their way into the scores of such films as "Dead Ringers," "Se7en" and "The Silence of the Lambs" — friend and fellow Canadian Cronenberg isn't much for attending opera or the live stage.
"That's no knock on stage," said Cronenberg, 65. "I don't go to the cinemas much, either."
Nonetheless, over the years after the release of the film, Cronenberg and Shore would spitball ideas on how to bring "The Fly" to a new medium.
The story's structure — a love triangle largely within the same set — had Cronenberg thinking about staging "The Fly" as a play.
But Shore, who would adapt his "Lord of the Rings" score into a choral piece, had other ideas.
"It wasn't until I was writing 'Lord of the Rings,' which took me almost four years to write, that I felt ready to work on 'The Fly,' " the composer said. "I was working my way up to it."
"Ultimately, we came to an understanding," Cronenberg said. "Mine was to say, 'If we were going to do an opera, I really want to do it for the stage.'
"I'm not interested in doing video projections, which is what a lot of people are doing these days, because that would be too much like remaking the movie."
For the opera, both Canadian bass baritone Okulitch and Romanian mezzo soprano Donose are making their L.A. Opera debuts for the roles of eccentric scientist Seth and his lover, Veronica, which were played in the film by then real-life couple Jeff Goldblum and Geena Davis.
Cronenberg's 1986 screenplay was an adaptation of the same George Langelaan short story that also served as the basis for the 1958 film "The Fly," starring Vincent Price. But unlike the cult black-and-white B-film, Cronenberg's version had some nasty, colorful effects.
If exploding animals and maggot babies don't strike you as opera fodder, then you're not the first person to be skeptical.
"The notion seemed sort of outrageous and right at the same time," librettist Hwang admitted. "One doesn't normally think of operas based on science-fiction source material.
"But the way David has interpreted the material, it has a tragic love story, death and birth, transformation and a lot of things that make a good dramatic opera plot."
