99 avant-garde operas on the wall

I breakfasted heartily this morning in Prenzlauerberg with a bunch of Americans and pretty much the entire city of Berlin. Everything is closed on Sundays with the critical exception of churches and restaurants. It's clear what you're expected to do. God, followed by Eat. Having been told that Sunday brunch was a horrible experience in Berlin, I am happy to report that this is completely untrue. (Who told me that?) Moreover, they do all kinds of unexpected things with food, here. I picked up a carafe of something yellow and poured it on my muesli. Yum. What the hell was that?! Picked up a carafe of something else also yellow and poured it onto my eggs. Hmm ... tastes like ... applesauce?

Tonight I went back to the Komische Oper for their Teseo (Inszenierung by Benedikt von Peter). It was rife with German allusions which, sadly, I am still not equipped to pick up on. From what I could gather, von Peter sets the plot (yet another Greek drama with extra frills c/o Handel) in whatever would be the German equivalent of the stop on the LIRR where the girl with the pink miniskirt and terrible nail polish gets off.

The characters begin in a waiting room with plastic lawn chairs and a coffee/hot chocolate vending machine in the corner, and end up in a dirt-filled shantytown that may or may not be showing signs of nuclear fallout. During one scene, Theseus spoons raw beans from a can. About twenty minutes into the opera there is a literal deluge on stage (technically, I have no idea how they did this), turning the dirt into mud. Every scene thereafter involves a mud fight (which all the singers did very willingly for singers). There's a giant wind machine that kicks up some of the mud (this got the blue-haired audience in front of me duly riled up), and in another scene, a family of -- I think -- Turkish immigrants (remember, I'm guessing here) descends on Agilea on her trailer-park porch and within two minutes is having a full-on raging party with hotcakes and wine until Medea breaks through the back wall with an ax. I'm not making this up. Von Peter must have found one aria in the second act a complete yawner because he turns up the house lights, projects the words, and insists the audience sing along. Get it? Karaoke. In an opera house.

I was impressed with the singers in this production. I was impressed with their acting especially. Still, I wanna say the opera was maybe ... a little like other recent MODERN, AVANT-GARDE, NEVER-A-DULL-MOMENT Handel stagings I've seen recently. I don't wanna von-Peter bash, because the guy is smart; the production was riveting. But I AM saying that this production belongs in an era with other productions like it, and which for lack of a better coinage I'll call collectively super-tricked-out-technologically, plus-hilariously-pop-culture-referency, plus-there-are-singers-who-could-model-underwear Opera.

I-think-you-know-what-I-mean.