ROBERT TINKER Enlarge Image

Sex, violence and song! Mlada Khudoley and Gregory Dahl in Manitoba Opera’s production of Salome.

Manitoba Opera’s latest production of Salome has no trouble translating today

It’s not that opera needs to be seamy, steamy or gobbet-dripping to successfully captivate modern audiences. It’s that opera just so happens to be that way.

Take perennial favourite Tosca, staged by Manitoba Opera this time last year, which featured sexual blackmail, murder and, finally, suicide, right before our eyes (as well as some offstage torture). While this may have made debutantes and matrons call for the smelling salts 100 years ago, there’s little problem in making such material relevant now.

Likewise, Salome, Manitoba Opera’s season opener for 2011-2012, is unlikely to shock many into silence or horror. Nonetheless, this classic by Richard Strauss, based on a play by Oscar Wilde, should have audience members squirming in their seats. (What essentially amounts to a burlesque number, with soprano and lead Mlada Khudoley sporting a pair of glittering pasties, may also turn a few silvered coifs a starker shade.)

The story, rather freely adapted from Biblical sources, concerns Princess Salome (Khudoley) and her obsession with imprisoned prophet John the Baptist (Gregory Dahl). She yearns to kiss him but he is repulsed, she being the daughter of "harlot" Herodias (Judith Forst), wife of the Judean Tetrarch Herod (Dennis Petersen). Indeed, the prophet crawls back into his cell rather than sullying himself with such an "evil" woman.

Herod, meanwhile, is equally obsessed with Salome. He promises to grant her any desire if she performs the Dance of the Seven Veils for him. She obliges — and shocks the gathered by asking for no less than John the Baptist’s head on a silver platter.

That this tale’s inherent shock value is being capitalized upon is clear. Yet the story is truly about the twisted extremes of human behaviour, and there is a psychological soundness where motivation is concerned. The fact that the cast is as able with dramatics as it is with vocal virtuosity succeeds in making the action convincing; Khudoley is particularly good at conveying Salome’s alternating desire and venom.

The action plays with the unity of a Greek tragedy, unfolding in its entirety in real time, enabling its dark logic to fully play out before us so that we can savour it. This is especially true of the drawn-out final minutes, which allow us to (unsettlingly) relish the outcome to its fullest. (This very structure, which eschews the characteristically operatic form of multiple, crescendo-reaching acts, in favour of 110 minutes of continuous action, may itself better appeal to contemporary audiences.)

Salome by no means invented the macabre, the graphic, the lurid or the passionate in the so-called classical arts; reach as far back as you like — through writers such as Shakespeare, painters such as Caravaggio and all the way to Greek tragedy — and you’ll find no shortage of vivid representation. What one hopes is that the rookie viewer of today puts on their coat afterwards exclaiming, "I didn’t know opera was like that!"