Who knew Hercules had the pipes to sing?
Patrick Morganelli did. He’s the composer of Hercules vs. Vampires, a stage show featuring the 1961 B-movie Hercules in the Haunted World—upgraded with nine opera singers doing the live voice-over for Herc and his would-be blood suckers.
Specifically, Coachella Valley is getting the LA Opera singers to voice them, accompanied by the LA Opera Orchestra, at the McCallum Theatre on Friday, Nov. 6.
The campy film stars Christopher Lee, notorious for playing Dracula in a number of Hammer horror films, and Reg Park, a big, muscly man touted as the mentor to Arnold Schwarzenegger. The Italian director, Mario Bava, is known for his mix of sleaze and horror that kept people up late at night for generations.
“One thing people love to ask is: How did you come up with this idea?” Morganelli said during a recent interview. “And the fact is, I didn’t come up with the idea. It was a commissioned work by Opera Theater Oregon—and even more so, they were not the first organization to do this. My connection with Hercules began in 2009, when I got word that a small opera company in Portland wanted to do this project doing a film/synchronization opera using the film Hercules in the Haunted World. I knew that this was a Mario Bava film, and I’m a big fan of Mario Bava’s movies, and I thought, ‘Oh, well, this sounds interesting.’”
Morganelli heard about the commission, reached out, and was asked to submit a demo. “Which I did. I just got lucky, and they liked mine.”
However, he did not get to choose the name of the new show.
“Personally, I really favored the title Hercules in the Haunted World for the opera, because I thought that sounded more operatic,” Morganelli said. “But, Opera Theater Oregon, they said, ‘No, we really like Hercules vs. Vampires.’ And I figured, well, you know, they’re the ones producing this, and they’re the ones paying me, so, sure, we’ll go with that.”
Morganelli mentioned a strange moment in the film: “It’s when Hercules and Theseus have to battle Procrustes, the rock monster. In a movie today, a rock monster would be something really awe-inspiring and probably quite scary. But back then, Procrustes is very clearly a man in a foam rubber suit.”
Morganelli said it was not easy to meld Hercules in the Haunted World with opera.
“I had to rewrite a lot of the dialogue to make it singable, but I tried,” he said. “I kept it absolutely as close to the original story, the original dialog. A lot of people think that this is going to be kind of like Mystery Science Theater 3000. … At the most mechanical level, I still had to try to get the words to synchronize with the mouth movements of the actors on the screen. From a technical perspective, it was extremely difficult, but the meaning of the lines all remained exactly the same, because I really wanted to keep it as close to the original as I could.”
Morganelli said he does not plan to meld film and opera again, because of the difficulty—and the legal issues.
“We had been led to believe that the movie was in public domain,” he said. “But as we got in closer (to the premiere of the show in Los Angeles), the legal department at LA Opera was saying, ‘Well, we have to have something conclusive that documents that this is, in fact, public domain. Otherwise, there’s a potential that we could step on someone’s toes and get into some legal trouble.’ When we started digging into it, we found out that, in fact, the movie is not in public domain. It is still under copyright. … But we got very lucky that the individual who owns the copyright to the film actually lives in Los Angeles. He works in the entertainment business, and he’s a big LA Opera fan, so it really worked out well. My attorney reached out to him, and he was very amenable.”
Morganelli currently resides in Pasadena and has been hard at work on other composing projects, including three recent feature films and side projects.
“I’ve done a fair amount of conducting on scoring stages and in recording sessions,” he said. He’s planning on being at the McCallum Theatre performance—but he won’t be conducting.
“I was enormously flattered that LA Opera would even consider letting me conduct it,” he said. “I really don’t have that kind of conducting experience. Then they decided that Blair Salter is going to conduct it. I think she’s well-qualified for this, and I’m very interested to see what she does with it.”
He encouraged people to come to the show at the McCallum, even if opera and/or B-movies from 1961 aren’t their cup of tea.
“I think everybody there should come and see it,” he said. “It’s a lot of fun; it’s relatively short. It’s 74 minutes, so it isn’t like coming to see a Wagner opera that’s 4 1/2 long.”
Hercules vs. Vampires, a production of LA Opera, will be performed at 8 p.m., Friday, Nov. 6, at the McCallum Theatre, at 73000 Fred Waring Blvd., in Palm Desert. Tickets start at $43. For tickets or more information, call 760-340-2787, or visit www.mccallumtheatre.org.
