A month or two ago a local theater group did a production of The Vision Bird. It’s an opera based on a few short stories Araim Something (I don’t remember? Maybe started with M?) wrote back when Oakh was conquering everything and some fables. It’s set in ambiguous history, it looks like before castes have entirely shaken out, and before electricity.
The story was kind of all over the place and did not make a ton of sense, but you definitely got the sense that whoever wrote it didn’t really like blues. But it was silly and exaggerated enough that it didn’t actually seem to represent any actual nations, and some things were so wildly unbelievable that nobody could actually get in trouble for it. The music and songs were pretty, and the costumes and sets were gorgeously detailed.
(Pictured from right to left: The emperor, his two quarreling childless sons, and half his court.) I was also impressed that they portrayed actual purple traders rather than just blues and greens (and a yellow) as an important part of the court.
When the emperor was younger, he conquered his nearest neighbors so he could expand and avoid actually enforcing population controls, but now that he’s old he just wants to have grandchildren. But his new neighbors are attacking his borders, and his empire is running out of space and resources so his population is rioting, and so this magic bookie (? She’s got this motif of math symbols that project onto the floor while she dances? I do not know exactly what she does) person shows up to help.
She showed up to the court and did this amazing dance around this bird under the light of all the moons, and the bird turned golden and gained the ability to sing words and see things far away, to warn the emperor of any trouble he needed to react to. (The bird was more normal looking, he looked yellow and white and blue, and then while the bookie danced around him, the stage lights shifted, and they did something clever with whatever they made the costume’s feathers out of, and he spun and turned this shiny metallic gold. Also, it doesn’t really show up in the photo, but the bookie had some sort of silver thing in her hair and it was mostly invisible, but sometimes the lights hit it just right and it reflected really brightly in weird patterns, and this was the coolest scene! It was so pretty and kind of creepy and weird, and the dancer did a really good job, and the strings and drums and metal-percussion sounded incredibly magical)
The bird warns about riots and attacks (and sings advice about implementing rudimentary population controls) and he sends people to respond in time. Then there is a riot near the coast, and he sends his sons to practice dealing with it, and they don’t come back. The bird warns of an attack on the coast, and so he tries to send his army to attack, but they aren’t willing to go, so he says that he’ll go, and they agree to follow him, with this proof that he’s not throwing their lives away.
(He is not any good at this, but I think this was also before specific agreements about non-greys fighting in wars? But as you can see he is not a good soldier.)
This part was sort of grimly comedic, and there was a very nicely sung part where the entire court and army sings that they need more space and food but he keeps wasting their resources in pointless wars, and then this shift to a louder more traditional military-ish song while they all pile him onto his horse and follow him offstage. The emperor missed a few of the notes while he was climbing onto the horse, but I think it was on purpose. Also the entire army was clearly the earlier court members, but changed out of their beards and wigs and into helmets with conveniently long grey neck-guards.
Without spoiling too much, here’s the alien/fairy/extremely-foreigner queen explaining that she rules a nearby island with so much extra space and that she has magic that can fix his problem and they can have so many babies if he just marries her and merges his empire with her kingdom. (I looked up videos of the song later and I think she transposed it down an octave to hit all the notes, but it sounded really good). And he falls under her spell and agrees, and ignores her description of promising the same thing to whichever of his sons killed the other, and the implication that they’re both dead right offstage (ew).
Her wig was black, but they did something with the stage lights, and its highlights started to look weirdly red as she slowly corrupted the empire. It was really unsettling.
And the makeup on her black- and glowy-silver-haired army looked off, and combined with sections where all the lights went out and it was just the drums and this incredibly uncanny brassy-sounding-theremin and their steps and swinging metal noises and faint glimpses of movement while they invade, and they all looked totally alien and it was incredibly creepy and cool!
And then at the end the bird explains that it was a fiction and a moral lesson. Yes, thank you otherwise I might have missed that. And then it says that this actually wasn’t a tragedy because nothing but the bird was real?? Wat.
Other than the copout at the end though, and the expectedly-silly plot, it was really good!
[OOC: credits: The court (slightly edited for reds), astrologer and bird, riding to war, the seduction. All are from various photos online of performances of The Golden Cockerel]
