There’s a lovely rave for The Manga Flute at Repeat Performances, a website I hadn’t come across before. Some excerpts:

… [T]he ever-adventurous West Edge Opera commissioned a complete and artistic reworking of this staple of the stage, re-titled The Manga Flute, with a poetic and fanciful English libretto by David Scott Marley. The opening … was not only a success, but surprising in the scope of its originality.

And:

… fetchingly illustrated in backdrops by Megan Willis …

And:

The magic of the comic book format was as unlikely as it was an effective vehicle for our time, while the wind score accommodated the vocal range without sacrificing the meaty overtures.

(Did he mean overtones? Only one overture.) And:

[T]he real success of this venture was at least partly due to the talented cast, led by Eugene Brancoveanu as Papageno. I have no idea why that huge-voiced and velvet-tongued baritone is still in the Bay Area, instead of piling up fame and fortune at the Met or La Scala, but I suspect he chooses creativity over earthly desires …

And:

The princess Pamina was played to the hilt as a blue-haired manga vision, by Heidi Moss Sali … with the charm and purity that also makes her a darling of concert repertoire. Opposite her, Tamino bumbled about as a briefcase-toting Tokyo businessman who painfully transforms into her hero, sung with warmth and a sense of natural ease by tenor Darron James Flagg. And Elyse Nakajima popped out amazing high notes with crystal clarity in that most difficult of all coloratura soprano parts, the vengeful Queen of the Night.

And:

At first it was surprising how many young children attended, but it was a great fit for young audiences …

Woo hoo!

Is Repeat Performances a new website? Not many reviews up. Nice to see they plan to cover theater and dance as well as music and opera.

A review by Janos Gereben is now up at the San Francisco Classical Voice website. A couple of excerpts:

David Scott Marley’s The Manga Flute, a new English adaptation in Japanese comic style, is bold, outlandish, delectable entertainment. Add a wonderful cast, with some major vocal/stage performances, and there is a must-see Flute in the El Cerrito Performing Arts Theater.

And:

Among Marley’s many “innovations,” perhaps the best is his substitution of three young-soprano raccoons for the Three Boys, another puzzlement in the original. The raccoons don’t just float in and out — they are essential parts of the story, playful and destructive one minute, wise and problem-solving the other ….

The premiere of The Manga Flute is this afternoon at 3:00 pm. The theater will be very full — as of yesterday morning the orchestra section was full except for a handful of singles around the edges, but there were still seats available in the balcony.

The show looked great at the dress rehearsal on Friday. Megan Willis’s art is glorious and vibrant, and the costumes play beautifully against her backdrops. The prologue, a manga sequence created by Megan and beautifully assembled by Jeremy Knight, is terrific — you don’t want to miss the overture.

The cast was terrific, despite some dialogue flubs and nerves. Eugene is a hoot as Papageno. The Three Ladies were stronger and funnier in the opening scene than I’ve seen them before. All of act one feels like it is working beautifully all the way through. Act two felt like it might be five minutes or so too long. Caroline, the stage director, Jonathan, the musical director, and I talked Friday about the possibility of cutting a few minutes out at the dress rehearsal to see how it went, but Caroline decided it was wiser not to, and while I was open to the experiment, I don’t mind at all not making it after all — it’s easy to make a poor decision when you haven’t played the show before a real audience. Seeing how the show works for an audience may make clear exactly what it would be best to trim (if not for this production, then for the next), or could reveal that some other adjustment than trimming is what’s needed, or even that the show works fine as it is and we’ve just gotten to know the show too well to see how it will play.

And of course making changes is a burden on the memories of the performers and makes it that much harder to be acting and singing at their best. Given that the potential improvement to the script is somewhat minor, it may well be wiser to let it go for this production and make a note of the change for use in the next production, should there be one.