Use all its tropes – inter titles (which replace the opera’s dialogue passages), cinema techniques like fades, iris ins and outs, even its annoying scratches and artifacts pay homage to Buster Keaton, Nosferatu’s Max Schreck, cinema bad-girl Louise Brooks and then project this on a giant screen in front of which the singers interact. This is a production where you stare agape at the images, awestruck in amusement, yet you hear this wondrous soundtrack lurking in the background, somewhat undervalued and slightly unused. There’s so much going on – projections, animations, and special effects (the old-school wizards at Disney would heartily applaud and be green with envy) – all brilliantly realized and conceived – that there’s no other place for Mozart than the backseat. Mozart being Mozart, it’s difficult to upstage him, but the real star of this show is animation designer Paul Barritt, 1927’s co-founder and co-artistic director. Whether this is good for the future of the art, I don’t quite know, for Herr Mozart takes second place to all the visual shenanigans that surround his sublime music. A feat of theater prestidigitation of the highest caliber, it raises the bar for all operas yet to come. It is spellbinding, amazingly theatrical, state-of-the-art, and thoroughly mesmerizing. Houston Grand Opera’s presentation of Mozart’s final masterpiece, The Magic Flute, a co-production between Komische Oper Berlin and London avant-garde theater company 1927, is one for the ages.

Houston grand opera the magic flute