Director promises Vegas version of ‘La Perichole’ is fun

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before.

Two people get drunk one night — and awaken the next morning to discover they’ve gotten married.

If it sounds like the plot of “What Happens in Vegas,” or maybe the Vegas episode of “Friends,” guess again.

Because that’s exactly what happens in the comic opera “La Perichole,” which Sin City Opera brings to the Winchester Cultural Center Friday for a six-performance run.

The opera’s title may be French, as is its composer, Jacques Offenbach — whose works include such operas as “Tales of Hoffman” and “Orpheus in the Underworld.” (The latter’s “Infernal Galop” doubles as the music that traditionally accompanies the cancan.)

But this “La Perichole” is sung entirely in English — and boasts a very Vegas sensibility, thanks to Sin City Opera’s Artistic Director Skip Galla, who rewrote the opera’s libretto.

“That’s one of the things that’s so great for us — we use Vegas like a little secret language,” Galla says, taking a break from rehearsing the cast — in the living room of his central Las Vegas home, which has been cleared of furniture during the preproduction period.

And while “La Perichole” takes place in 18th-century Peru, “the story could absolutely take place here,” adds Ginger Land-van Buuren, the opera company’s executive director.

Galla says “it’s maybe the funniest piece” he’s ever staged, about two impoverished street singers — the title character (sung by Cincinnati-based mezzo-soprano Lauren McAllister) and her beloved Piquillo (Las Vegas-based tenor Kevin Harvey), who are so poor they can’t afford a marriage license.

Enter Peru’s lusty, lecherous viceroy (San Francisco-based baritone James McGoff), who’d like to make La Perichole one of his mistresses. But before she can join his ladies-in-waiting back at the palace, she must have a husband.

The merry marital mix-ups that ensue include a first-act finale in which “the notaries are drunk, the bride is drunk and the groom is drunk,” Galla says.

Indeed, as La Perichole tipsily tiptoes across Galla’s living-room rehearsal stage, “I’m just a little bit intoxicated,” McAllister sings. “If my words are a little slurred … don’t say a word.”

Still to come in the second act: the “Suppository Song,” in which four women find Piquillo passed out, “after a very rough night,” and decide “the suppository is the story,” Gallo explains. “They use a giant suppository to wake him up. And it works.”

The comic opera’s love triangle sets the stage for absurdist comedy that’s “a little crazy, a little silly,” Galla says.

Then again, that’s what he aimed for during the year it took for him to translate “La Perichole’s” libretto twice — once in a literal, word-by-word translation, then with more colloquial, artful lyrics.

“My voice teacher from college would be so proud of me,” says Galla — whose “day job” finds him at University Medical Center, working as a registered nurse in infection prevention.

Although “the scheduling is sometimes complicated,” he says, “I think if I didn’t have both, I would go nuts.”

In adapting “La Perichole,” Galla found several existing English-language translations, all of which were “really too academic,” he says.

Instead, his “La Perichole” libretto goes for the laughs — and turned out to be “the hardest translation I’ve done to date,” he notes, with “250 pages of music” and what feels like “250 million words. I have never translated anything so wordy.”

Winchester Center audiences won’t have any trouble figuring out those words, though, because English supertitles will enable everyone — including the hearing-impaired — to follow the opera’s “ridiculous fun.”

The lighthearted story line enables contemporary audiences to “connect with opera the way they haven’t been able to before,” adds Land-van Buuren. “It’s not four hours of anybody trying to kill themselves.”

Despite all the onstage antics, however, the music remains serious business. Offenbach’s “charismatic” score — full of rhythmic boleros, lively galops and triple-time seguidillas —“just will not quit,” Galla says.

Neither will the comedy, he promises, glancing at one of “La Perichole’s” props parked on his patio: Zebrina, a giant plush zebra sporting four pint-sized, pink glitter-and-zebra-stripe cowboy boots worthy of the “only in Vegas” label.

“I love trying to find out how far I can push something,” Galla says. As director, “my only job is being a stop sign,” signaling cast members when “ ‘we’ve gone too far.’ ” Then again, in Las Vegas, there may be no such thing as going too far.

Read more stories from Carol Cling at reviewjournal.com. Contact her at ccling@reviewjournal.com and follow @CarolSCling on Twitter.