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It's easy to overdo this business of "Opera in the Cornfields" when you're talking about the Des Moines Metro Opera. Contrary to some reports, cows and pigs do not roam the lobby of the Pote Theater, and there wasn't a pair of overalls in sight on opening night.
Still, the smell that wafted into the hall during the recent opening-night performance of "Falstaff" isn't normally associated with opera. It turned out to be popcorn, which was being prepared in a red-and-yellow wagon in the lobby.
Opera and popcorn. The snootiest of art forms and the quintessential cuisine of middle America may seem like strange bedfellows, to borrow a phrase from Shakespeare's "The Tempest," an opera adaptation of which had its world premiere in Indianola the following night. But the people who run the Des Moines Opera see nothing anomalous in mixing the two.
"What we're trying to get at is that opera is a living, breathing thing," says Douglas Duncan, the opera's rotund, 35-year-old managing director. "It's upbeat and it's fun. It doesn't have to be serious."
Take the company's television advertisements. One of them shows an overweight Brunnhilde in her Valkyrie horns and breastplate bellowing in German, while a voice-over narrator intones, "You won't see this at the Des Moines Opera Company. We feature only Americans, young performers, and we sing in English." The kicker is the identity of Brunnhilde: none other than Duncan himself, in drag.
Whatever Duncan and Robert L. Larsen, the opera's 52-year-old artistic director, are doing, it must work. The company has survived for 14 summers - and not by giving its Corn Belt audience a safe diet of "Madame Butterflys" and "Carousels." Almost every season has featured a 20th-century opera: Carlisle Floyd's "Of Mice and Men" and "Susannah," Douglas Moore's "The Ballad of Baby Doe," Benjamin Britten's "A Midsummer Night's Dream."
This year Larsen and Duncan realized a dream by commissioning their own opera: Lee Hoiby's "The Tempest." The opera, which opened June 21, is playing in repertory through July 13 with "Falstaff" and Gounod's "Romeo and Juliet," lending a Shakespearean flavor to the entire season.
The premiere of "The Tempest" had to compete with an Iowa version of a tempest: a thunderstorm that played a drumbeat on the...