Muammar el Qaddafi: The Opera

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Gaddafi: A Living Myth

LONDON

English National Opera

9/7/06

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Turner and Tikaram, Reagan and Gaddafi at ENO

Classical and Opera Reviews

Gaddafi: A Living Myth

by Simon Thomas | 1 September 2006

With Gaddafi: A Living Myth, English National Opera has succeeded in reaching a new audience.

Whatever its shortcomings as a work of art, and some people are going to hate this production, Gaddafi: A Living Myth is a breath of fresh air at the London Coliseum.

Whether it’s an opera, a musical or something else entirely, this new show raises questions that are much more important about the world we live in.
The ENO has gone all political. Two months ago on the stage of the Coliseum we saw Richard Nixon and Mao Tse Tung in Nixon in China. Now we have impersonations of Colonel Gaddafi, Ronald Reagan and a comical portrayal of Tony Blair (hardly a massive leap for most people to make).

As with the John Adams work, this is not a naturalistic portrayal of figures from recent political history. The work written by Shan Khan and with music by Asian Dub Foundation and Diaspora is unlike anything else you will have seen on this stage.

With a pounding beat that hardly lets up all evening, Gaddafi mixes the orchestra of the ENO (minus woodwind) with the members of ADF and a handful of Middle Eastern musicians. It’s highly amplified and uses taped loops, hip hop and drum n’ bass. For opera audiences still reeling from the shock of the recent introduction of surtitles, it’s all very new. Not only do they have to deal with being able to understand what they’re seeing in conventional opera now but they are being encouraged to step outside their usual terms of reference.

Not that the first night audience saw many of the opera regulars. There was an eclectic mix, many of whom I suspect hadn’t stepped through these doors of high culture before.

While the Western politicians are rather ridiculed with almost Spitting Image impersonations, the “hero” of the piece is portrayed in a way that he’s not usually seen in the West, even in these days of thawed relations. There’s Gaddafi as a loving family man, a man who meditates, a peaceful revolutionary, a politician who is prepared to resign out of disgust with the corruption in his own government. How seriously we are supposed to take this romanticised version of the man I’m not sure. We also see Gaddafi the tyrant, who liquidates his dissident opponents, is implicated in terrorist acts and opportunistically gives the West what it wants (a show trial of the Lockerbie suspects). Then there’s “Gaddafi Superstar”, the egotist revelling in the cult of personality. Finally we see a white silhouette, inviting us to fill in the blanks ourselves, Gaddafi the Enigma.

What all this does is ask us to put aside the prejudices of decades of misinformation and propaganda and see personalities and events from a different viewpoint. That’s badly needed and very timely in these days of fragile world relations. If we’re to avoid out and out hostility, we’re going to need to step into other people’s shoes and try and understand them on their own terms.

Gaddafi: A Living Myth isn’t a tightly-constructed piece of play-making. It uses the device of a news reporter commentating on events to help fill some of the gaps as the action jumps around the decades – 1986 to 1969, back to Gaddafi’s bunker during the US air raids, then 1970. This is a series of set-pieces showing aspects of the man rather than a coherent narrative. It doesn’t succeed in steering clear of clich at times, with the simplistic observation that the West’s only interest in the Middle East is its oil. If it offends sophisticated artistic, as well as some political, sensibilities with its naivety, that’s no bad thing and probably what its creators intended.

The production is often imaginative, which is to be expected from director David Freeman, who has a history of exciting opera work and has been missing from the London scene for far too long. The use of projections and graphics with stage designs by Es Devlinand Chloe Lamford is effective.

There are some problems with amplification levels, meaning the words are often difficult to follow (there are no surtitles this time). Not that the text, spoken not sung, is unmissable. Much of it is in rhyming couplets which sounds dangerously like doggerel at times.

There’s a quite charismatic performance of the Libyan leader from Ramon Tikaram, who struts about the stage like a cross between Henry V and Richard III, both hero and monster. There is an earnestness about some of the supporting performances at times that is close to laughable but also some well-timed humour (“Every Mad Dog has its day”).

Gaddafi plays for just five more performances and, wherever you’re coming from, I would urge you to see it for yourself. It’s a meeting of different cultures, artistic and social, and there’s not enough of that in the world today.

Gaddafi: A Living Myth

From: lpowell@xxxxxxx
Date: 25 Aug 2006 07:32:56 -0700

Hi all.

‘Gaddafi: A Living Myth’ is a new production from English National
Opera and the Asian Dub Foundation.

Fusing contemporary, classical and world music stlyes it is an intense
and provocative exploration of the man and era that is ‘Gaddafi’.

Check out http://www.eno.org/gaddafi for more info on the production which
opens at the Coliseum on the 7th of September and is running for 6
performances!

This show delves into some of the most controversial political debates
of our time and is a must see for 2006!

—

By Matthew Westphal

Photo Journal: Is It Even an Opera? English National Opera’s Gaddafi: A Living Myth Befuddles Critics

11 September 2006


Scenes from Gaddafi at ENO, with Ramon Tikaram in the title role and Sharon Duncan-Brewster as Fatima.
photo by Sarah Lee/English National Opera

“The old guard were cowering in their seats as the huge bass frequencies boomed out. Singing was conspicuous by its absence … All we tended to get was a bit of shouting.” (The Telegraph)

“It’s not really an opera but could well become the Evita of this decade — a slick, sardonic and cynical treatment of recent history.” (The Times)

“A breath of fresh air … raises questions that are much more important about the world we live in.” (musicOMH)

“It is not exactly opera but it makes the perfect PC (Politically Correct) musical.” (The Independent)

“A total failure … the kind of ill-conceived insult to one’s intelligence which leaves you reeling at the thought that the ENO could have supported it. (GramophoneOnline)

“Clumsy rhyme ruins for me, a daft tale of Tripoli” (headline in the Financial Times)

“A few brief songs emerged like brilliant shooting stars out of the aural putty, but the rest seemed to echo Bombay Dreamspickled with Holst’s The Planets and a dash of crunk rap.” (Evening Standard)

“No show this weird can be truly bad.” (Associated Press)
Therewith, a sampling of the reception that English National Opera‘s season-opening production received in the press over the weekend.
“The audience isn’t going to know what’s hit them. It’s not necessarily going to be a comfortable evening, but it will be a highly contentious, visceral experience.” That was ENO artistic director John Berry, quoted by the AP last week, anticipating reaction to Gaddafi: A Living Myth.

He got that right.

The work was commissioned by ENO from Asian Dub Foundation, a music collective variously described as “dance/hip-hop,” “exotic electronica” and “raga/rap.” The music was composed for the strings and brass of the ENO orchestra, plus Arabic lutes and drums and various electronic beats, by the Foundation’s Steve Chandra Savale (a/k/a “Chandrasonic”). The project was billed as the world’s first rap opera when it was announced; in the event, the rapper engaged to play the Libyan leader pulled out (replaced by a popular television star), and the text is mostly spoken, or shouted, over the instrumental score.

Gaddafi was one of several seemingly radical ideas undertaken by Berry’s predecessor, Seán Doran — who was ousted as ENO artistic director last year amid increasing turmoil within the company — to attract to the house audience members who normally wouldn’t consider going to the opera, a pastime associated with upper-class poshness even more in England than in the US.

(Of the other such ideas Doran had, the ones that went over best were a 2004 concert performance of Act II of Wagner’s Die Walküre at the Glastonbury Festival, an outdoor rock event, and engaging filmmaker Anthony Minghella to direct Puccini’s Madama Butterfly. The latter staging was a major hit, and has been imported by the Metropolitan Opera to open its 2006-07 season on September 25.)

It’s too soon to tell whether new audiences are coming to the Coliseum to see Gaddafi (it runs in repertory through September 16), let alone whether they’ll come back to see La traviata or even Philip Glass’s Satyagraha.

But observers can, and do, argue about the work’s quality and whether or not it belongs in the opera house. Most of the critics have plenty of praise for actor Ramon Tikaram’s charisma and stage presence in the title role. But the rhymed-couplet libretto by Shan Khan was heaped with blistering scorn: “a sprawling series of bloody episodes,” wrote the Evening Standard‘s critic, “heavy on tendentious flab, short on drama.”

And is it an opera or not? Composer Savale told The Telegraph: “In terms of structure it is operatic, although there is no operatic singing. But it deals with some big, universal themes through the medium of music, so perhaps it is. But a question we are asking is why should opera sound a particular way?”


Scenes from Gaddafi at ENO, with Ramon Tikaram in the title role. (And yes, that’s supposed to be Ronald Reagan at upper left.)
photo by Sarah Lee/English National Opera

Canadian Opera Company goes hip-hop – Canada.com

http://www.canada.com/story_print.html?id…f2c6…‎

7 mai 2008 – Britain’s English National Opera production of hip-hop fusion “Gaddafi: A Living Myth” in 2006, met mixed reviews. Hip hopera is just another …

First Night: Gaddafi: A living myth, English National Opera,

London

Not exactly opera, but it makes the perfect PC musical

BY MICHAEL CHURCH

FRIDAY 08 SEPTEMBER 2006

Wheels grind slow in the opera world, and sometimes all the better for it. Three years ago, Steve “Chandrasonic” Savale persuaded the then boss of English National Opera to commission his raga-rap Asian Dub Foundation to create a piece about Muammar Gaddafi. Time passed, the boss was sacked, more gestation-time was granted, and the world moved on: the easy political certainties of 2003 gave way to the swirling doubt by which we’re now surrounded, where friends and foes are hard to tell apart.

As Savale points out in his programme note, there’s a plethora of ways in which we can view Gaddafi: brutal tyrant and purveyor of terrorism? Misrepresented national hero, anti-imperialist champion of the oppressed? Or just a marginal figure whom oil has thrust into the limelight? What Savale claims to offer – and what the Libyan embassy bought tickets en masse last night to see – is an “audio-visual re-imagining of the myth”.

It’s clear from the outset that we’re in for a very fast canter through 80 years of history, and designer Es Devlin wastes no time. Her notion of Libya is as a blank canvas, on which Gaddafi is given licence to paint. Each new political event invites a new layer of paper, plus a fresh flurry of video projections. History is made and remade. And it works: different coloured lights seen through incised paper make a dainty palace for King Idris, which cuts immediately to the Six Day War done in giant headlines with archive footage of fighting in the desert.

Warned by director David Freeman that this is not a musical, and that “there’s not much singing in it”, one can readily accept that this is basically a spoken drama plus soundtrack. It begins pretty creakily, like an old-fashioned son et lumiere, but soon builds momentum.

Ramon Tikaram’s blustering Gaddafi – with a hint of depressive, paranoid depths – intones his lines (which have more than a touch of the Rupert Bear) over a pre-recorded drumming track, and at moments is almost endearing. But though no “composer” is credited, this is very much Asian Dub Foundation’s show. As part of our aural furniture, their style is a known quality, and it’s both loud and crude: when the massed strings in the pit come in at the beginning, backed by synthesised sound from elsewhere, one feels almost sorry for the little figures on stage, miked though they are.

So will this work, as ENO boss John Berry avers, “redefine opera”? Hardly. But if some West End producer is looking for an impeccably PC musical, this could be it.

Gaddafi: A Living Myth at the English National Opera – 2 Reviews

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Mon Sep 18, 2006 6:45 am |

Neither a hit nor a myth
By Anna Picard, The Independent, 17 September 2006It was fitting that before the premiere of Gaddafi: A Living Myth, no
one involved in this unlikely collaboration between Asian Dub
Foundation, playwright Shan Khan, and English National Opera could
agree on a term to describe the finished product. Asked whether his
score was operatic, ADF’s Steve Chandra Savale, who admitted little
knowledge of the art-form but professed himself interested in it “as
a concept”, fired back: “Well, what is opera?” Meanwhile, the ENO
website issued an optimistic advertisement for “an exhilarating
collision of live music, theatre, and film”.

Oiled by unprecedented media attention, the opening night of Gaddafi
saw a heavily papered house drawn from backgrounds as “diverse” as
Notting Hill, Hampstead and Islington. Opera-lovers unaccustomed to
pop music started using terms like hip hop, ragga and dub with
passable fluency. Still, no one could agree on what it was they had
seen. Springtime for Gaddafi? Don’t Cry For Me, Ronald Reagan?
Muammar Mia? Gaddafi Superstar? (this was a line repeated several
times on stage.) Was it a musical? Music theatre? Or simply a
headline-grabbing folly?

Orchestrated by no less than three ghost-composers, Savale’s score is
based on a bedrock of bass guitar, drums and sampled sound-effects,
with plaintive esclamazione for electric violin and oud, and the odd
interjection of a harmonic minor scale from the ENO orchestra. There
is little singing, though Sharon Duncan-Brewster (Fatima) delivers
her numbers prettily, punchily and with a clarity of diction that
eludes most of the non-singing cast. Act I is constructed as though
for a CD, and the change of tone and tempo between each number is
artful. Act II, however, flounders as miserably as the libretto.

Where Alice Goodman used the concentrate of a diplomatic visit for
her psychological analysis of Richard Nixon, Khan assays a history of
modern Libya. In a series of flashbacks from the Tripoli bombings of
1986, Act I touches on the Italian annexation of 1911 (“Feel the boot
of the North!”), the assassination of Omar Al-Mukhtar, the Six Day
War, and the 1969 coup. Act II covers the shooting of Yvonne
Fletcher, the 1986 Berlin disco bombing (described in the libretto as
responsible for the death of “one American Serviceman”, when two
servicemen and a Turkish civilian were killed, 230 injured, and 50
left permanently disabled), the destruction of Pan Am Flight 103 over
Lockerbie, and, finally, Gaddafi’s meeting with Tony Blair in 2004.
(“We’re both living in a state of emergency. Urgent measures are
needed to save our democracy.”)

Khan’s biographical tableaux bring us no closer to a man variously
described as visionary or mad. Though mention is made of Gaddafi’s
donations to the IRA and the UDA, his human rights record is fudged,
and the device of using a foreign correspondent to report off-stage
events is dreadfully lazy. Gaddafi’s monologues, largely written in
couplets, are yet more problematic. Here’s the Penguin Dictionary of
Literary Terms on rhyme: “It echoes sound and is thus a source of
aesthetic satisfaction.” Really? It’s almost impossible to make lines
such as “I can sense the bombs from afar, the desert wind is my only
working radar” (emphasis on the final syllable) sound less than
unaesthetic. Especially if, like Ramon Tikaram, whose physical
impersonation of Gaddafi is well observed, you deliver them in the
style of Ian McShane declaiming King Lear in a nightclub.

Though director David Freeman and designer Es Devlin have done their
best to make Gaddafi a polished production, Hakeem Onibudo’s gauche
choreography undermines their efforts. The Revolutionary Nuns bump
and grind like dance-hall queens, making their “sweet leader” appear
as fatuous as Ali G, which is very much at odds with the awkward
business of depicting Lockerbie and the death of Yvonne Fletcher.
Given the limitations of the libretto, and its simplistic moral
equivalence, I doubt Freeman could have handled these moments more
tastefully. Still, I am surprised that footage of Fletcher’s murder,
hitherto unbroadcast by the BBC, was shown on stage.

If Gaddafi: A Living Myth does little to demythologise its subject,
it does reveal the cowardice of ENO in dealing with this unhappy
bequest from its former artistic director. For all the bluster
about “redefining opera”, I’d be amazed if the company did not fully
expect Gaddafi to bomb, especially after three years of workshops,
and the loss of two directors.

Springtime for Muammar
By Karla Adam, Newsweek, Sept. 13, 2006

Brian Green was stunned at what he saw when he opened the heavy oak
doors at the English National Opera. The 44-year-old opera singer is
no stranger to the high arts, but on this particular opening night he
was agog at who he saw milling about in the ornate lobby: senior
citizens in black tie, teenagers in cargo pants and a significant
number of twentysomethings wearing flip-flops.

The diverse crowd had congregated for the highly anticipated hip-hop
opera “Gaddafi: A Living Myth” which runs through Sept. 16. At worst
it may sound like a joke, at best a cheesy Mel Brooks knockoff. But
thisdare we call it a “hip-hopera?”is neither. The story follows
the life of Col. Muammar Kaddafi, the leader of Libya since 1969. The
soundtrack is built on ragga-jungle rhythms (an electronic form of
reggae), and if this sounds nothing like a typical night out at the
opera, well that’s the point.

So if the new work was meant to shock, then it succeeded. Critics
around London were left sputtering their wine as they grappled with
the rap-staccato singing over the brash and synthesized score by the
Asian Dub Foundation, a popular electro-punk collective. The
Telegraph gleefully reported that the “old guard were cowering in
their seats” while the Independent sniffed that the music was “loud
and crude.” The Times of London noted that while critics had
different things to say about the opera, “all agreed it was
completely bonkers.”

There is more to the opera than just the outre score, of course. This
is, after all, the story of a man Ronald Reagan once called “the mad
dog of the Middle East.” Played convincingly by Ramon Tikaram, the
fictionalized Kaddafi tends to surround himself with a cadre of
Amazonian female bodyguards who occasionally bust out a hip-hop
dance. The rest of the large, multiethnic cast play a variety of
rolesReagan, Tony Blair, Islamic terrorists and Kaddafi’s kids among
themto track the Libyan leader’s meteoritic rise from a poor boy
born in a tent in the desert to a man once high on America’s list of
dangerous tyrants.

But for all its roaring energy, there are several blunders. The plot
unfurls in disparate vignettesKaddafi plays soccer with his sons in
one scene, hosts Tony Blair in a Bedouin tent in anotherand they
fail to sew together a compelling narrative or even offer new insight
into Kaddafi’s psyche. The plot is paper-thin and there is little
conflict or suspense to push it forward.

This may not matter as much as it should. Although the opera was, for
the most part, critically panned on opening night, by its third
performance it had sold out. When artistic director John Berry was
asked minutes before the opening curtain what he hoped to achieve, he
told NEWSWEEK, “I hope this draws a new and diverse audience.” Given
the sheer number of hipsters trampling in off the street, the English
National Opera may well consider this one a success.

Opera

Gaddafi: A Living Myth

Coliseum, London

- Tom Service
- guardian.co.uk, Friday 8 September 2006 10.33 BST

Ramon Tikaram in Gaddafi: A Living Myth, ENO. Photograph: Tristram Kenton

English National Opera open their new season with an evening of unclassifiable music theatre.

Gaddafi: A Living Myth is part contemporary opera, part pop musical, and part cross-cultural dance track, with a score composed by Asian Dub Foundation, a libretto by Shan Khan and a production masterminded by director David Freeman.

It’s a brave attempt to create a vision for new opera in 2006 by dramatising the life of one of today’s most controversial politicians, but sadly the evening is never more than a hodgepodge of musical and cultural influences, with the amplified ENO orchestra augmented by the guitars and ouds of the Third Universal Band and an accompaniment of sampled beats.

The problem is that the story fails to answer the question that Ramon Tikaram’s Gadafy poses in his first entrance: “Who am I?” Instead of setting Khan’s text to music, ADF tell the Gadafy story with actors declaiming their words over the score, conducted by James Morgan. All of the characters, from Ben Bishop’s oleaginous Mr Mister, the embodiment of US imperialism, to Nicholas Khan’s Major Jalloud, have to shout their lines. It doesn’t help that the libretto inhabits an uneasy middle ground between rhyming doggerel and rap, so the characters are never more than one-dimensional stereotypes.

The story-telling is an uncomfortable mix of political hectoring and history lesson – the first half confusingly cuts between Gadafy in his bunker in 1986 during the American raids, the discovery of oil in Libya in the 50s, and the days before the coup in 1969 – and the show never decides whether it’s exploring the psychology of Libya’s leader or commenting on today’s political situation.

The staging has some neat ideas, using paper screens to project a kaleidoscopic video track, but it has some risible moments that look and sound like a Middle Eastern version of Springtime for Hitler. The production really loses its way in the second half, building to a messy climax with Tony Blair’s 2004 meeting with Gadafy. The most profound thing the show says is reserved for the final moments, when Gadafy says to the audience: “If I wasn’t here, you’d need an actor to play me.” Gaddafi may be a living myth, but it’s dead music theatre.

· In rep until September 16. Box office: 0870 145 0200.

Gaddafi: a living miss

ENO‘s attempt to piggy back off the trendiness of the Asian Dub Foundation reeks of cynicism and fear

- Charlotte Higgins
- The Guardian, Tuesday 12 September 2006

World leader pretend… Ramon Tikaram in Gaddafi: A Living Myth. Photograph: Tristram Kenton

On Friday night, English National Opera launched its new season with a bold experiment: a new work that is a collaboration between the company and the hip-hop artists Asian Dub Foundation.Gaddafi: A Living Myth created an extraordinary buzz of anticipation before its opening night, more media interest than the company can ever remember for a production. Its first night was an “event”: le bon ton came out in force, from celebrity architects to publishing moguls.And the result? A naive, dumbfoundingly literal march through 20th- and 21st-century Libyan history. A piece that was extraordinarily untheatrical, about whose characters one cared nothing, whose pacing was stultifyingly unvarying and whose music struggled to sustain its two-hour length. It was saved from looking a complete turkey by some very good performances (notably Ramon Tikaram in the lead) and the virtuosity of ENO’s technical team. The obvious parallel to Gaddafi – a work of music theatre on the life of a famous world leader – is John Adams’s masterpiece Nixon in China, given a wonderful revival recently by ENO. In terms of sophistication, wit, imagination and emotional depth, there is, alas, no comparison.

What’s depressing about this is that it feels like a case of one struggling and unfashionable artform piggy-backing off the trendiness of another. It’s a trade: ENO gets to be perfumed by hip-hop’s cool, whereas ADF gets to experiment with a different form on a national stage.

Nor would the trade-off be unacceptable if it seemed as if making the work had been an artistic necessity. But it didn’t. If the writers had any notion of the theatre, had anything that urgently needed to be said on the lyric stage, then it was lost on me. Indeed, it was hardly as if ADF had been haunting opera houses for years, dreaming of a commission: the idea that Steve Savale of ADF’s interest in Gaddafi should be converted into an opera came not from him, but from an impresario, Alex Poots, briefly the head of contemporary arts at ENO.

To be clear, the argument here is not that artists working in other forms should somehow be prevented from working in opera, or that opera should be kept pure for the members of an exclusive inner circle. Some of the most memorable interventions in lyric theatre have been from artists known primarily for other media: the Quay Brothers’ designs; Mark Morris’s choreography; Auden’s libretto for The Rake’s Progress; Minghella’s direction of Madam Butterfly.

The observation is simply this: ENO’s attitude that ADF should be brought in to brighten or shake up opera smells of cynicism rather than artistic conviction.

Worse than that, it smells of fear. John Berry, the artistic director of ENO, last week said that the word “opera” was a major problem with audiences, and that word has been suppressed in marketing the project. At the same time, he hopes that at least “a handful” of the new audiences brought to the Coliseum by Gaddafi will return to see more traditional works.

But if you imagine that new audiences will come to the Coliseum only for “not-opera”, surely it is illogical to believe that they will return for what you bill incontrovertibly as opera? And if you, the management of the national opera company, contend that opera is such a bitter pill to swallow that it has to be disguised, if you have such little confidence in the artform, then why, bluntly, should anyone else be interested in it?

No one doubts the right, indeed the duty, of ENO to experiment, to evolve the artform, to widen the pool of artists with whom it works – and to fail honourably, from time to time, in doing that. But Gaddafi: A Living Myth is, alas, a phoney.

· Charlotte Higgins is a Guardian arts correspondent

charlotte.higgins@guardian.co.uk

From Pierre Tristam, former About.com GuideIn September 2006, the English National Opera and the BBC produced an opera about the life of Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi titled, “Gaddafi.” (Spellings of Qaddafi’s name have ranged from those used here to Kaddafi, Kadafi, Ghaddafi and more.)
The opera was “an examination of the creation of a myth,” retelling the story of a Bedouin who becomes a powerful political leader. The chorus represented Qaddafi’s all-female bodyguards. The opera was directed by British film director Antonia Bird. The music was written by Steve Chandra Savale, a former guitarist with the group Asian Dub Foundation, on a libretto by playwright Shan Khan.

“It’s a brave attempt to create a vision for new opera in 2006 by dramatising the life of one of today’s most controversial politicians,” The Guardian wrote, “but sadly the evening is never more than a hodgepodge of musical and cultural influences, with the amplified ENO orchestra augmented by the guitars and ouds of the Third Universal Band and an accompaniment of sampled beats.

A new opera based on the life of the Libyan leader Muammar el-Qaddafi, featuring a rapper as Qaddafi and a chorus of all-female bodyguards, highlights the new season of the English National Opera. The program of London’s second-largest opera company will be the first season fully organized by the company’s new artistic director, Sean Doran.

Arts, Briefly; Qaddafi, the Opera
By HEATHER TIMMONS; Compiled by Ben Sisario
Published: 17 January 2005The English National Opera and the BBC are producing an opera about the life of the Libyan leader Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, below. The piece, titled ”Gaddafi,” will be ”an examination of the creation of a myth,” and will tell the story of a man born into a Bedouin tribe who becomes a powerful political leader, the opera company said. Colonel Qaddafi’s all-female pack of bodyguards will be represented by the opera’s chorus. The British film director Antonia Bird, whose movie ”Priest,” about a gay clergyman, won the International Critics Award at the BerlinFilm Festival in 1995, will make her opera debut directing the work. Steve Chandra Savale, a former guitarist with the group Asian Dub Foundation, will compose the score, and the playwright Shan Khan will write the libretto. The opera is scheduled to open in February 2006. HEATHER TIMMONS

Muammar Muhammad Abu mInyar Al Gaddafi:
PICS FROM THE OPERA:
http://www.tipsimages.it/Search/Search_Editorial.asp?imid=405347&rpid=32&LAID=2&SRCV=Muammar+al-Gaddafi

The work is a recent example of the blending of pop strains and classical opera form, a trend seen particularly in Britain, where the English National Opera commissioned the hip-hop Asian Dub Foundation to make a work about the Libyan leader Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi.
Music
Classical music
Opera
Ad Libya? No, it’s all in the script
The libretto in this daring collaboration from ENO and Asian Dub Foundation is so banal that even brave acting and directing can’t save it(A VERY UGLY AND BAD WRITE-UP, not concerning the music; but about Our Supreme Commander!The writer is prejudiced, biased and totally MEAN!
by Anthony Holden)
The Observer, Sunday 10 September 2006
“Gaddafi: A Living Myth”
Coliseum, London WC2

Tony Blair’s bad week got worse on Thursday evening, when he was depicted on the stage of a state-subsidised London theatre accepting a fat cheque from the man once known as ‘the godfather of terror’, Libya’s Colonel Muammar al-Gaddafi.

…OK, the music column does not usually devote its first three paragraphs to political analysis, but this week it is unavoidable. Asian Dub Foundation’s Gaddafi: A Living Myth is presented on the stage (and in the name) of English National Opera. There is no way the piece can be called an opera – none of its leading characters even sings – but it is certainly a brash work of music-theatre, making an ambitious attempt to grapple with complex contemporary issues.

Accentuate that word ‘attempt’, for the piece signally fails to answer the questions it raises. The many conflicting sides to the intriguing figure of Gaddafi are serially presented, uniform by uniform – liberator, ideologue, religious zealot,..but the end-product fails to take a position. The first half is an inert Wikipedia guide to the Libyan leader, a dictator painted by numbers, and the more animated second a confused morass of suggestive set-pieces, sending us back into the night to sort it out over dinner.

This is largely the fault of the writer (or ‘librettist’), Shan Khan, whose decision to go for rhyming couplets leads to long stretches of jaw-dropping banality. Ronald Reagan, for instance, rapping to his advisers that ‘All this hocus-pocus don’t sharpen my focus’. Or Gaddafi himself proclaiming that ‘Terrorists are those who have not yet won/The West knows that power comes from the barrel of a gun.’…

Colonel could be a kind of catalyst for Arab unity.

Gaddafi’s own inspiration is Egypt’s Nasser, who opens the evening with the thought that the Arab world harbours ‘a role wandering aimlessly in search of a hero’. This would seem to suggest that the ensuing story is that of the hero finally filling this role. But the team that has put it together fails to come up with the courage of that, or any other, conviction.

They are blessed in the confident, inventive direction of David Freeman, and the bravura acting of Ramon Tikaram in the title-role. The designs of Es Devlin are lavish and innovative, but the choreography of Hakeem Onibudo is cringe-makingly Top of the Pops hackneyed – above all in the case of Gaddafi’s glamorous female bodyguards.

The music of Steve Chandra Savale and his ADF ranges from hip-hop to rap, electronic tub-thumping to cliched movie soundtrack. But the members of ENO’s house orchestra joining the jam-session, conducted by James Morgan, are the only possible justification for a national opera company hosting this piece. In the West End it would be shrugged offstage as an amateurish update of Evita. At the Coliseum it is an aberrant false start to an otherwise bums-on-seats new season.

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Gaddafi: A Living Myth

Gaddafi: A Living Myth

Gaddafi: A Living Myth

First Night: Gaddafi: A living myth, English National Opera,

London

Not exactly opera, but it makes the perfect PC musical

Springtime for Muammar By Karla Adam, Newsweek, Sept. 13, 2006

Opera

Gaddafi: A Living Myth

Gaddafi: a living miss

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Springtime for Muammar
By Karla Adam, Newsweek, Sept. 13, 2006