King Arthur - Surely You Jest?

Tattered point shoes, cardigan paired with a long blue tulle tutu; metal folding chairs, ladders, a refrigerator and a man inside covered in fake frost. "King Arthur is not a dance, it's a show," director and choreographer Mark Morris boasts in the notes to his dramatick-opera, King Arthur.

The original version, with music by Henry Purcell and text by John Dryden, when first performed in 1691 at the Queen’s Theater, Dorset Garden, London ran about four hours. Morris' version weighs in at just under two.

While the semi-opera has never had a "traditional" interpretation, Morris' version takes it to its outermost examination. This Baroque-contemporary updating jettisons the spoken text - all of it - substituting the movement of Mark Morris' dance group for words, accompaned by seven solo New York City Opera singers flowing in and out of the troupe.

The humorous and joyful result is almost vaudevillian, a let's make a play and dress-up revel that on the one hand is campy and fantatic and on the other at times left me with my head tilted to the side saying, "huh?" While many scenes rocked and popped with pleasure, others were equally tiresome, the artifice distracting rather than entertaining.

If you take opera or dance seriously, the good-times of Morris' performance at Lincoln Center may provide less formality than what you care for. Yet even those dressed in ball gowns were caught smiling and laughing during the glorious final scene that included a Chinese-ribboned maypole dance and paper airplanes being tossed overhead.

"I couldn't have real airplanes," Morris bemoaned in the theatre notes. "I didn't have any money to hire the Blue Angels for a giant festival with a flyover." Perhaps not, but his
jovial production still manages to soar and delight.