Even Insects Can Sing Arias

Having hosted the likes of Tchaikovsky, Toscanini, Mahler and Stravinsky on its centuries-old stages, the Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris is no stranger to superhuman talent. Yet on July 2, the venerable institution put forth another kind of unearthly display: the premiere of its latest opera, "The Fly." In this sci-fi tale, an ambitious scientist who tries to uncover the secrets of teleportation accidentally splices his genes with those of a housefly. However nontraditional the plot, the production was hardly fly-by-night. Plácido Domingo (general director of both the Los Angeles and Washington National operas) conducted; acclaimed filmmaker David Cronenberg (who helmed the eponymous 1986 film remake) directed. Academy Award-winning composer Howard Shore, of "Lord of the Rings" fame, wrote the score, and Pulitzer Prize-nominated playwright David Henry Hwang ("M. Butterfly"), the libretto.

Aficionados had better get used to unconventional fare. Insects, teleportation and metamorphosis mark just the beginning of the unlikely subjects that opera companies are tackling. In their quest to make the genre more contemporary and draw younger audiences, they are embracing such quirky and occasionally down-market topics as the Manhattan Project ("Doctor Atomic"), Federico García Lorca's latent homosexuality ("Ainadamar") and an American TV talk show whose guests throw chairs at one another ("Jerry Springer: The Opera"). Its host: a former Cincinnati mayor who resigned upon charges of soliciting prostitution. Not that there's anything new about crowd-pleasers. "The classic works that we love from the 1800s and 1900s were probably very relevant to those times," says Shore. But there was also less competition then. "It's obvious that there's a real drive to bring opera into a modern era, to keep it as an art form and not as a museum," says Cronenberg. "It's inevitable that people will be looking everywhere for inspiration."

In the past decade, children's tales such as "Alice in Wonderland" and "The Little Prince" and novels like George Orwell's "1984" and J. M. Coetzee's "Waiting for the Barbarians" have all been adapted for the operatic stage. Six years ago, British composer Nicholas Maw adapted "Sophie's Choice" for London's Covent Garden. For a September bow at the San Francisco Opera, Amy Tan wrote the libretto for "The Bonesetter's Daughter," based on her novel about a Chinese-American woman who uncovers an unsettling family secret (sidebar).

Movies have proved especially easy to appropriate. In 2003, Austrian composer Olga Neuwirth reincarnated David Lynch's 1997 neo-noir "Lost Highway." Robert Altman and Arnold Weinstein co-wrote the libretto for "A Wedding," based on Altman's 1979 film, for the Lyric Opera of Chicago in 2004.

To be sure, offbeat operas have surfaced before. Composer-librettist Philip Glass created an avant-garde trilogy in the 1970s and '80s that included "Einstein on the Beach," a five-and-a-half-hour piece with no intermission, and "Akhnaten," which explored the eponymous pharaoh's religious convictions. The centerpiece was "Satyagraha" a nonlinear account of Gandhi's years in South Africa that's sung entirely in Sanskrit, employing excerpts from the Bhagavad-Gita. Premiering in Rotterdam in 1980, it was revived last year at the English National Opera and then this April at New York's Metropolitan Opera, both to critical acclaim.

But what was once the exception is now the rule. Since the dawn of the millennium, the outré has become ordinary in opera. In 2003, Hwang and Grammy-winning Argentine composer Osvaldo Golijov staged "Ainadamar," an allegory of García Lorca and his male lover, told in reverse chronological order. Two years later, composer John Adams and librettist Peter Sellars chronicled the anxieties of Manhattan Project masterminds in "Doctor Atomic," which is scheduled for a new production at the Met this fall. The art form reached unprecedented levels when "Jerry Springer: The Opera" played at Carnegie Hall in January after a nearly two-year run on London's West End. "A story that makes a good opera is one where the reality is heightened," says Hwang, who has written a total of seven operatic librettos. The bombastic nature of the medium almost invites outlandish plotlines. Hwang says, "The form itself is not realistic. We don't sing to each other all the time."