Long Beach Opera’s Good Soldier Schweik Came to Santa Monica. Where Were You?

American composer Robert Kurka’s only opera, Good Soldier Schweik, began life in 1956 as a six movement suite based on characters from the popular Czech antiwar novel of the same name, by Jaroslav Hask. New York City Opera became interested in turning the suite into an opera and Kurka expanded the orchestra from his original scoring for 7 woodwinds, to 16, plus brass and percussion, and began working with librettist Lewis Allan – a songwriter known for the celebrated anti-lynching song, “Strange Fruit,” and the Frank Sinatra hit, “The House I Live In,” but chiefly, as the adoptive father of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg’s sons after the couple had been convicted of espionage and executed.

Kurka died in 1957 at the age of 35, four months before the opera’s successful NYCO premiere. Within the next 40 years, Good Soldier Schweik had seen over one hundred productions throughout the world, and been translated into 12 languages.

The work combines elements of American musical theatre, jazz, and Czech folk music, to underscore an explicitly anti-war story. The Long Beach Opera company’s cast of singing and dancing actors – led by tenor Matthew DiBattista in a powerhouse performance – delivered the goods in director Ken Roht’s dazzling multi-media production at Barnum Hall in Santa Monica. The orchestra – well, band, in this case – played with stylish pizzazz under Conductor/Artistic Director Andreas Mitisek.

Ably realized through Dan Weingarten’s inspired lighting and Justin Jorgensen’s novel set design, the production utilized scrims, projections, choreography, and outlandish props to whisk the plot from scene to scene at a breakneck pace, so that the audience was as disoriented as Schweik by the experience.

The house – mostly all long-time Long Beach Opera fans, and mostly very elderly – was packed, attesting to their pleasure at not having to endure a schlep to Long Beach. This brings me to my only gripe with this enterprise: somehow, LBO’s marketing missed the mark, hugely. Where was the large, 20-to-30-something demographic that would have been enraptured – and captured – by this stunning example of what opera has become in the 21st century?

- By Penny Orloff

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