Bill Raden
For some, opera conjures visions of putting on your best Tom Ford and plunking down $300 for La Traviata at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. For those whose tastes run a little more under-the-radar and Out of the Closet, however, Four Larks has just the ticket. The avant-garde musical theater company creates something it calls “junkyard opera,” which explores the space between the reverent pomp of the opera house and the playful repurposing found in the Larks' scavenging, secondhand ethos. That means transforming old warehouses or nondescript storefronts into lavish environments, using found and recycled materials as well as slightly used texts. Last year Four Larks adapted Flaubert's The Temptation of St. Anthony into a hallucinatory avant-pop-operatic dance experience at a secret location in the Broadway theater district. For 2016, expect a remounting of its ethereal 2011 production of Undine, adapted from Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué's German Romantic mermaid tale.
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