Bava on Broadway!?!?

How on earth did we miss this? A UK stage production mixing a 1641 opera score with Mario Bava’s 1965 sci-fi/horror film PLANET OF THE VAMPIRES?

Taken from the Off-Off Blogway:

The Wooster Group’s production of Francesco Cavalli’s opera La Didone takes up a work from the days when opera was an emerging art form, and sets it down in a new world splintered by video imagery and made brazen by the electric guitar. Stirring another Italian cultural work of art into the mix, the Group brings into collision the ancient shipwreck tale of Aeneas and his Dido with the crashed spaceships of Mario Bava’s 1965 Sci-fi B-movie horror film Planet of the Vampires. Identical leather spacesuits, forbidding planetary landscapes and battles with the walking dead meet with the baroque qualities of Cavalli’s score.

And an article about it from The List

It means opera fans shouldn’t expect a simple telling of the legend of Aeneas as he ventures from the smouldering ruins of a defeated Troy into the alien land of Carthage and the arms of Dido. Nor should trash culture buffs expect only the tale of Captain Mark Markary whose spaceship is lured to the planet of Aura where a dying race of aliens inhabits his zombie-like crew. Rather they should expect both at once: a cross-cultural cocktail of mind-boggling oddness.

On one hand, you’ve got Dido, played by mezzo-soprano Hai-Ting Chinn, wearing a cape of sci-fi silver. On the other, you’ve got space cadet Sanya, played by Valk, who joins in with the operatic choruses. There are ray guns and baroque strings, punch-ups and arias, helmets and wigs. It’s as unconventional as the electric guitar in the four-strong orchestra and is certain to blow up a storm of outraged critical sensibilities when it opens at the Royal Lyceum.

And to refresh out memory, here is a scene that recalls a certain extraterrestrial terror franchise, followed by a piece of cut an paste experimental animation to round this post off...