A couple of weeks ago I wrote a preview for Peepshow which opened last night at Campbell House.  Summarizing crudely, the idea was to present a show that broke down some of the barriers of formality that make the opera house intimidating and so open up the genre to a different kind of audience.  So did Peepshow do that?  The answer has to be “to some extent”.  There were four shows in four rooms and in an ideal world they would have each played at intervals throughout the evening and people would have been able to drop in and out as they chose.  The geography of Campbell House simply doesn’t make that possible.  It’s a 19th century house with stairs and corridors and fairly small rooms with mostly “do not touch” furniture.  Each room will only hold a dozen, in a couple of cases perhaps twenty people, in comfort levels ranging from OK to excruciating.  This means that audience members must be assigned to specific performances, rounded up and herded to their allotted place at the right time; or as close to it as possible as it always takes longer to herd an opera audience than anyone imagines.  And no drinks in the performance rooms.  Once in, for an admittedly only fifteen minute show, you are as stuck as in a performance of Parsifal at Bayreuth.  In other words, rather than a fluid experience it’s a series of chunks of more or less traditional concert hall broken up by some socializing at the bar.

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