Friday, April 30, 2010

A Night at the Opera

Happy Danish Prayer Day!

I had off from work today because of the prayer holiday. Joey and I spent the day sleeping in until 12:30pm. The night before we both fell asleep in a late-night kebab shop and didn't get home till 4:30am. Luckily, my co-worker's friend gave us a ride home. I told him he would be in my prayers today. I don't think we would have made it home without him. The wheat bun party was a success.


Today we had a late and slow start to a dark and rainy day. We had brunch for about 3 hours in a local slow-service cafe. Then we walked, biked, and bussed our way around Christianshavn and Christiania, the local hippie commune.

We couldn't figure out the function of this attachment on the top of this building?






We decided to buy tickets to the new, fancy opera house across from the Queen's palace. At first we couldn't find the door to the ticket center, but we saw a guy waiting outside where we thought the door would be and he pointed us to the right place:



The name of the opera was Skin Deep. The play was in "english" but was sung in opera. I got a better understanding of the dialogue by reading the Danish subtext. Which means to say that I had no idea what was being said, but from what I could piece together, the plot went something like this:

The setting is a plastic surgery office in Scandinavia (? or some place cold). The main character, Dr. Needlemeyer, is in love with his receptionist Donna but he thinks she's ugly and wants her to get plastic surgery. The Dr. is married to this beautiful lady who he doesn't like (?) but he does plastic surgery on her all the time. The Dr.'s daughter is also a fan of plastic surgery and she convinces her boyfriend to enlarge his boy parts. Afterwards she loves him so much more but now he is so much in love with himself that he doesn't pay attention to her. So she has her dad do plastic surgery on her to make her look like him so that maybe he will love her now.

The doctor has a side business of saving everyone's fat and the body parts he has removed and is creating this elixir that will make everyone look like the same beautiful plastic people if they drink it. The missing link in the soup is a good-looking guy's testicle. It just so happens that this actor is visiting the clinic and they decide to drug him and steal his testicle to complete the elixir.

Back to the main story...this love triangle between the doctor, his plastic wife and the ugly receptionist...At some point he performs surgery on the receptionist and his wife at the same time and switches their appearance so the receptionist now looks like the beautiful wife and and the wife now looks like the ugly receptionist. I think then an avalanche happens (?...the building shakes, a picture falls down, snow (or dust?) falls from the ceiling, then all or a sudden they are cross country skiing in the mountains).

Everyone moves to warm, sunny California and they further develop this elixir and keep transforming people into carbon copy pretty people. Every so often he has to sacrifice someone in to the elixir and at some point he has to choose between killing his wife or his receptionist. He ends up killing the receptionist by throwing her into this vat of boiled body parts and then his wife ends up throwing him in after her.

This is where it gets a bit fuzzy. The elixir runs out and the Doctor and the receptionist are laying on the ground in what looks like a huge pile of vomit. The actor guy finds his testicle in the bottom of the empty vat and puts it back. Then all the people who have been taking the elixir are suddenly happy and released from this brainwashing elixir. They are all wearing bikinis and they just start stripping down naked and throwing their suits up in the air and dancing around. (They weren't completely naked. The actors were wearing these skin suits with drawn-on hair and anatomically correct parts). They start pairing up and saying things about their partner like "I like her because she's allergic to peanuts" and "I like him because he has a soft belly." I don't remember much after this. I think I was in shock. The play ended shortly after.

Described in one word: RIDICULOUS


Opera house:

3 comments:

Nancy said...

Ha. That does sound pretty ridiculous!

eLizaBeth said...

Hope that ends up on Broadway. And I'm thinking that structure attached to the building is part of a crane to pull containers off of a ship which might pull up just in front there?

Anonymous said...

The attachment is a trebuchet, used for lifting boats up out of the water and propelling them across the town.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trebuchet

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