I went to a (probably) illegal opera in a secret location that made me change my mind about boulders

    "Are you the type of person who has both Tom Waits and Steve Reich on your playlist?" I cleverly thought to myself, pre-emptively mind-blogging during the first half of the show. You can't blame me. Following my LA Sonar to a random block in the warehouse/ manufacturing/ sadness-stripper district of Downtown LA to a completely transformed warehouse turned arthouse was too novel to allow for immediate suspension of disbelief.

  Like being in a dream, we watched the actors shift in and out of a sandbox, but not a messy sandbox. It may have been a "junkyard opera," but it wasn't haphazard. The music, too, was accessibly complex. Some songs were fun and even broadway-esque, others more like a John Adams/ Sondheim collaboration. Some were even funny. I laughed at Cerberus that was a stickler for rules. I sat and watched precise blocking and choreography with live accompaniment in this strange environment. It struck me as odd that these total outsiders were doing what we all thought we'd do once we got to LA: they were taking advantage of the Wild West maze of decrepit buildings and staging  illegalish art events. "How did you pull this off?" the locals asked the woman at the door. "We rented it on craigslist."

  It wasn't until Orpheus got to Hell that I really snapped out of patting myself on the back for my assured future cleverness and started really wondering if he was going to snatch his blonde bride out of there. We all love the ancient Greek Hell because we know that Hades, like all Greek gods, can be pleaded with or tricked. A lovable villain, he charmingly appears here as a sort of Nietzche's-bureaucratic-brother. For a musical that is whimsical and pretty and dreamy, there were moments of bite and wisdom. Orpheus is urged to look at death from another perspective. From one angle, there's the terror of the finite, tilt your head and the same thing appears to be peaceful endlessness. I was touched by Persephone in a genuine way, who had clearly reached a level of understanding about death that Orpheus was too naive and Hades was too jaded to grasp. Just a novelty this opera was not, although I'm sure most of the buzz will be on the novel aspects.

  Even the cliches in my mind about Sisyphus shifted. Maybe it's not so bad that he does this task over and over again, that mankind itself is doomed to repeat its struggles. Isn't there some kind of beauty in the cycle? In the struggle itself? I mean, what else is he going to do with that rock?

  There you have it, folks. The underground art scene is high brow these days. But then again, a decade ago, I was writing papers about LA's own Bukowski being elevated to the mainstream canon. Low to high, high to low, Opera to Warehouse, direct to you. If you ask me, these guys are doing LA right.