The Galloping Cure – Festival Theatre
Oh my God. What just happened to opera?
Missy Mazzoli’s The Galloping Cure absolutely blew me away in its first half. Not merely as opera, but as theatre, music and visual spectacle colliding in something that felt, genuinely, like a tipping point.
If this is what modern opera is going to be, it has a wonderful life ahead of it.
Everything begins relatively straight. The music, the characters, the world. Then gradually it starts to contort. The familiar bends out of shape and suddenly we are somewhere else entirely. There are echoes of The Music Man, flashes of Carousel, and then we seem to tumble headlong into The Matrix, vertical lines of light streaming through the Festival Theatre stage as though we are stepping between realities.
At the centre are ...