May Day will forever be associated in my mind with the opera "Albert Herring" by Benjamin Britten. Flopper played Mr. Gedge the vicar and wandered around singing "Virtue says Holy Writ... is virtue ...is rarer then pearls" for about two months. As a result I know this opera inside out.
The basic gist is that upon finding "the female sex stained" i.e. all the girls are lascivious as goats in May the town elders of Loxford are without a May Queen. So they find a virtuous lad by the name of Albert who is more sexually repressed then a bus load of Mormon missionaries force and him to be the "May King". He gets drunk on spiked lemonade at his coronation banquet and wanders off leaving his prim Victorian neighbors to think that he is dead. Coming on the group of mourners at the end of the third act Albert reclaims his masculinity by telling off Lady Billows and the town elders and recounting his evening of sinful repast.
Here is Albert dressed up "like a blinking swan".The things they'll do in East Suffolk :)
It's a very fun opera.
No comments:
Post a Comment