Bat out of Hell
Author's notes
by David Scott Marley
(The following is slightly adapted from my program notes for the 2004 Berkeley production.)
In the summer of 1995, Jonathan Khuner, the artistic director of Berkeley Opera, asked me if I had any interest in writing a new English libretto for Die Fledermaus. I did.
Not that Fledermaus lacks for English versions. It may well have been adapted into English in more versions than any other work of music theater in history. As we started to talk about what our production would be like, I looked around for existing English versions to study, and I was able to put my hands on nine or ten in no time at all.
But only one or two of the adaptations I found conveyed anything remotely like the spirit of the original work. Some of them were full of the stiff pseudo-Elizabethan thees and thous that were imagined to be obligatory in poetry a century ago. (In the original libretto, the characters speak in the breezy Viennese slang of the day.) At the other extreme are several witless versions that turn Die Fledermaus into a sort of extended vaudeville skit, replacing the wit and social satire of the original with a relentless stream of low gags.
Yet, as performed on its opening night, Die Fledermaus was a sharp, well-constructed farce, set in a suburb of the city it was written for and poking fun at familiar character types drawn from contemporary society. One character, Prince Orlofsky, was even a sendup of a current celebrity. Audiences laughed because they recognized these character types from their own lives.
In fact, although Die Fledermaus is often spoken of as the quintessential Viennese operetta, it seems to me to be one of the least Viennese Viennese operettas ever. The Viennese usually preferred their operettas set in exotic locations and inhabited by gypsy royalty, mysterious adventurers, exotic princesses, and long-separated lovers. The sort of people, in fact, who might plausibly talk in thees and thous. The best-loved stories weren't satirical, they were romantic.
In short, everything that appealed most to the particular tastes of the Viennese, Die Fledermaus was not. I think that's exactly why it's the one Viennese operetta that has traveled very successfully beyond the city limits.
In fact, in its wit, its construction, and perhaps most of all its light-hearted attitude toward sex and infidelity, Die Fledermaus has much more in common with the impudent, irreverent tradition of French operetta — and fittingly so, for it was Offenbach himself who persuaded Strauss to try his hand at operetta. Die Fledermaus is even based on a French farce by Henri Meilhac and Ludovic Halevy, who happened to be Offenbach's best librettists. Though the story was moved from Paris to Vienna, the flavor of the boulevard comedy was preserved.
Strauss also modeled the musical and dramatic structure of Die Fledermaus to a great extent on a French hit, Lecocq's La Fille du Madame Angot, which had swept all Europe the previous season. It's true that a few numbers in Die Fledermaus are clearly tailored to particularly Viennese musical tastes — most notably Rosalinda's czárdás in Hungarian style and Falke's sentimental "Bruderlein und Schwesterlein", both in the second act. But those are the exceptions, not the rule.
So in Fledermaus we have a curious situation, though not an uncommon one in the theater: A work that first became famous for its sassy, up-to-the-minute social satire has now come to be thought of as a charming, nostalgic period piece. And as I thought about Jonathan's proposal, I saw the challenge I wanted to tackle: How could I capture for a Berkeley audience today something of the spirit this work had for the Viennese over a century ago?
Setting my version in modern-day Berkeley was one of many random ideas I proposed in those early discussions, but I didn't mean it very seriously. For a long while I was leaning much more strongly toward leaving the story in Vienna but updating it to modern times. I had a very specific objection to Berkeley: sure, I thought that much of the story would work very well in our own time and place — but then there's that "Bruderlein und Schwesterlein" number in the second act. It seemed to me to evoke Vienna so strongly and so particularly, I felt sure that, no matter what was going on in the story at that point, as soon as that music began the audience would be yanked out of Berkeley and back into Vienna again, and that whatever illusion I might have successfully created up to that point would be destroyed.
What's more, the number occurs just minutes before the end of the second act. The very last thing a playwright wants to do is send his audience out to intermission with the show's lamest moment fresh in their minds.
But Jim Campbell, who was our production manager at the time, loved the idea of setting the story in Berkeley, and pressed me to keep thinking of ways to make it work. And then one afternoon it suddenly came to me. The "Bruderlein" number expresses the sweetly naive idea that all the world's problems could be solved if we just hugged each other more and called each other brothers and sisters. And what's the one time and place other than turn-of-the-century Vienna that's famous for taking this attitude seriously?
Of course! I would turn the number into a reminiscence about Berkeley in the sixties. Berkeley has always seemed to me to have a schizophrenic attitude about its own past, fiercely proud of it and yet at the same time apologetic and embarrassed by it, and in this number I could have some fun with that ambivalence. And in fact, as the script developed, these conflicted feelings grew to become the most important theme of my story, for they're what that cause Rosie and Gabe to keep their pasts secret from each other in the first place.
With that hurdle behind me, I began writing Bat out of Hell, and the rest of the pieces started falling into place pretty nicely. The result, I hope, is a story that is faithful to the spirit of the original work even though the character types are drawn from our own time instead of Strauss's. Maybe even because they are.
It doesn't hurt, of course, that the operetta already has a brilliant libretto in German (well, Viennese German, which is almost a different language) from which I could crib all I wanted. It also doesn't hurt that so many of the most familiar English adaptations don't actually make much use of it. Some of the funniest lines in Die Fledermaus don't seem to have made it into any English version I've come across. Well, now they're in Bat out of Hell. How often does a writer get to surprise his audiences with something fresh and up to date simply by stealing from something a century old?
When I first wrote Bat out of Hell, we were on the upswing of the high-tech boom, and computer companies were raking in money hand over fist. My script is firmly set in the middle of all this madness, so much so that, short of a complete rewrite from beginning to end, it's no longer possible to present it as though it were taking place right at this very minute. For a couple of 2004 productions, I revised the script a little, and it now takes place in the summer of 1998, at the tail end of the boom.
So my up-to-the-minute adaptation is slowly starting to creep toward becoming a period piece itself. Well, that's what happens.