How many times have you seen a review of the latest Hollywood epic say, “Great FX, but….”? Mark Swed, Los Angeles Times Music Critic, feels the same about the Los Angeles Opera’s production of The Fly:

Just about any subject is ripe for opera. The film world and lyric stage have been influencing and stealing from each other since the days of silents. Brundlefly is no less reasonable a character for musical amplification than Rigoletto.

Yet in L.A. Opera’s ongoing monster mash (the commission before “Grendel” was Deborah Drattell’s “Nicholas and Alexandra,” which featured Rasputin), music has ranked in importance somewhere below makeup.

If you’d like to see and hear for yourself, click on the L.A. Opera site. There are many photos and several videos of the Paris and Los Angeles productions of The Fly. The L.A. company is shown here in an audiovisual outline of the story, and a second video samples the vocal performances.