Eight months from opening night, the Auckland Arts Festival has announced its first show for 2019 — and while it's an opera, it's likely to be opera as New Zealanders have never seen it before.
A cast and crew of around 120 will travel from Europe to New Zealand with Komische Oper Berlin's production of The Magic Flute. The 227-year-old Mozart opera is one of the world's most popular but this sees it reimagined as an animated cartoon with live singers directly interacting with film animations.
The collaboration between Komische Oper's Australian artistic director Barrie Kosky, Suzanne Andrade, from British performance company 1927, and animator Paul Barritt is said to have "the enchantment of Buster Keaton's silent movies, the dark underbelly of Tim Burton and Nosferatu, and the whimsy and humour of early animated cartoons like Felix the Cat and Betty Boop".
Auckland Arts Festival Artistic director Jonathan Bielski says it makes for an "absolutely knock-out" show which is inventive, hilarious and simply outstanding.
Around the world, reviewers have described it as endlessly inventive, a thing of wonder and a performance that must be seen to be believed. The New York Times went as far to say that "the production points the way toward a freer, more experimental style of producing opera, even in a mainstream context".
