BY STEPHANIE ESLAKE
Did you wince at the headline to this story?
If so, you might not be ready for what Paul Smith has in store.
Paul has teamed up with librettist Julie Koh to produce Chop Chef. And there will be blood.
The new opera is a dark comedy about reality television. The gruesome new artistic work shows us a cooking show where characters win…OR DIE.
And Paul loves it. We chat with this Australian composer about his newest, grizzliest work to date with Blush Opera.
(Watch the video below for appetisers before you get a taste of Paul’s interview.)
Paul, Chop Chef. It looks disgusting. And so appealing.
That’s what we are going for! A bit of cringe. Chop Chef is about six diverse contestants who enter a high-stakes reality TV cooking competition. Our contestants literally put their life on the line; when they are eliminated, they are sentenced to death on live TV in a manner that aligns with their cooking style.
To me, this is the logical conclusion for the high drama of reality television. I watch a lot of reality TV, and it is quite often that the contestants quit their jobs, leave their families, take big risks for a show. Chop Chef takes this just a tiny bit further.
I have been developing this show with our writer and librettist Julie Koh, and we keep coming back to the contestants. This show is really about these figures from the Australian landscape. Where did they come from, what do they want to get out of it, what are they willing to do, and when will they get the chop?
We were so excited to develop the individual voices of these people who you could actually see on a season of MasterChef or My Kitchen Rules.
So why are audiences so hooked on cooking shows – and why are you now choosing to tell these stories through opera?
Australians are mad about food. Maybe it’s because we have access to so many different amazing cuisines, and many of us have strong emotional and social connections to different foods.
I often talk about food when I lecture about music, because they share so many similarities in terms of how they are used culturally and socially, how they change over time, and how people try to dictate how they should be done. Whether it’s an authentic French brioche or an authentic Bach prelude, people will have strong opinions. And often, there is no one authentic version in the first place – so mixing the two through opera seems very logical to me. [These] two aspects of Chop Chef can build on each other.
In the video (above), you talk about the way that the music is grand, and the human voices express character and narrative. But above all – this piece is a satire. How do you communicate comedy through a serious artform?
Julie has written some incredibly hilarious lines. It is such a joy to get the text of an aria in an email and read it through for the first time. Then I start making notes about how the music can support and contribute to the humour.
I try to be flexible as a composer. For each project or show, I search for a ‘sound’ that I can then develop and manipulate. For each of the contestants, I’ve tried to find a sound which is a bit off-kilter and a bit unhinged. Everything is very tight in terms of the accompaniment and the rhythms, but in these little gaps, punch lines can come through and then you are doubled over in laughter.
It’s all very calculated just like a stand-up comic: every beat, every word is choreographed even though it looks relaxed. And then, when we need to, we can switch gears and deliver something heartbreaking, because these characters go through hell as well.
Like reality cooking shows themselves, this opera contains a fair bit of swearing. Indeed, the libretto appears witty partly because the language is so similar to what we’d find in the shows. How do you feel about contemporary art getting real?
I think it’s about demonstrating that opera still has things to say about our lives right now and that it’s not a fixed medium. It’s remarkably versatile. And this has happened in the past – the verismo period of Italian opera at the turn of the 20th Century saw operas move away from fantasy and the world of lords and ladies to the experience of daily life – and presto, you get Puccini’s La Boheme. So we ask: Who are the Mimi and Rodolfo of today? Who are the figures of our society that we think deserve an opera? Maybe it’s Kitty, our Hong Kong-born, experimental dim sum contestant. Or Renee, the souffle queen from Brisvegas, on a self-help quest while trying to please everyone around her. We want people to have a good time at the opera, enjoy the music, the characters, and the story; and when we need to, we will take it somewhere unexpected, somewhere you weren’t expecting. And that’s the ‘art’ part.
We’ve spoken before, Paul, when you wrote Fancy Me Dead…comedy meets murder, yet again. Do we detect a theme here? Should we be nervous?
I’m not sure why I find murder so funny! I also love horror films and Agatha Christie novels. Lots of different kinds of murder. I must admit that this time it was Julie that brought murder to the party and of course I had no hesitations. Smith and Koh is a dangerous double act.
What do you hope audiences learn about themselves, and about opera, through Chop Chef?
I think there are things in the characters of Chop Chef that will really resonate with people. Just like watching reality TV, we might see the best and worst of ourselves in the contestants. Some of the characters will really move people as well; their journey is quite tragic.
In terms of opera, Blush just wants people to see a great show that represents different parts of the Australian community. Thrilling operatic moments mixed with some unexpected music and a load of laughs. These are not necessarily the things people expect to get from an opera, but it’s what we want to deliver. And maybe, by the end of the show, people will have been taken somewhere they didn’t think they would.
Do you have any final words?
Ravioli, rigatoni, fettuccine carbonara,
macaroni, parmigiana, saltimbocca, arancini.
Say hello to Paul (if you dare) at Chop Chef: Meet the Composer, 7pm May 19 at Backyard Opera, Princes Highway.
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