User Reviews

There are several levels in this production and my opinion is not the same at all levels.

The setting and stage managing are very good, imaginative, creative even, and it really fills the vast space and volume of this enormous, particularly high stage. It does not require many people to move or transport furniture and other heavy or voluminous objects since it is mainly long bands of veil scrolling down from the rigging equipment high over the stage or vast mobile veil backdrops on which luminous projections give some very active scribbling or sketching life and density. Then some lights can give depth to the stage and emphasize this or that element or character. Even a swimming pool is a veil with some rippling lights on it. Perfect.

The music is also perfectly minimalist, and it creates an environment that is mysterious at times, joyful at other times, and it may express many other experiential feelings for the audience, including the sad evocation of death in the second half of the opera. It is sad to die but the music that accompanies this sadness is not a requiem, rather a dance, a liberation.

The third level is the singing. Here too, we can be satisfied with the voices selected for this opera and the way these voices are directed. They are expressive and they express an interesting characterization of all the various singers and the parts they are performing. Maybe Wald Disney is a little bit too mellow when he is taking some severe and highly debatable decisions against some people, accusing union members to be commies in the worst McCarthy tradition of the time, true enough. Walt Disney did not want at all to be in any way seen as favorable to anything that was redder than pure white. And the racist meaning this phrase contains is realistic. His dear brother was more of a rough boss in his tone, and this tone of his was in agreement with what he was saying too, not to defend, not to justify, but to impose his discriminatory decisions against anything unionized. Imagine what all these thousands of workers of all sorts could feel. The evocation of a strike is by far not enough to counterbalance the damning message.

And that's the last level and here I am very dissatisfied. Walt Disney deprived all the artists he used and abused of any right on their intellectual production that should have been their intellectual property. The moral right of theirs to have their names duly associated to the production, and even to have some kind of "royalty" for this intellectual property that should be a percentage, even if it is only 2 or 3 percent of the proceeds of the exploitation of the film to be shared among hundreds, thousands of artists. But for the Disney brothers, it was "no, no, no" at least three times. The artists of the Walt Disney studios were slaves. And if by any chance you tried to have your colleague unionized, you were fired on the spot. So, I am sorry, but the title is an enormous lie, we call that lies and not fake news.

We could wonder if the opera, the music, the text, the tone, the setting, and all other element created any kind of a distance between Walt Disney, the animated film producer, who was a genius, and the CEO of the studios, of the corporation who was a monstrous human resources manager. He was anti-union by principle, by economic interest, and by political opportunism. He was many other negative things in his way he dealt with people and society, and intellectual property for his films that looted and at times ravaged the culture of other countries. And he did not like children. He exploited their parents by hypnotizing the children with some miraculous film made by real professionals whose names were not even quoted at the time in the final credits, and today it goes so fast you could not even read them.

If he was a perfect American, we have to come to the conclusion he was a perfect imperialist in the cinema industry in the world, and a perfect terroristic boss who did not accept any other answer to his orders than "yessir mister master sir!" and what's more, wrapped up in the totally hypocritical "Yes Walt." The least we can say is that he overcompensated the simple origins of his. True enough his film empire was not in any way inherited. It could not be since he invented all that technique, technology, art, and industry. He invented...? You must be kidding me.

Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU