'Andy: A Popera': A party, with no rules

You know you're not there to hear Tosca when, a few minutes before curtain time, the general director of the opera company drops by with a stack of Dixie cups, "just in case alcohol arrives at your table."

Andy: A Popera is a party. The new piece, premiered Thursday night in a warehouse on North American Street in Kensington, riffs on episodes and philosophical innovations in the life of Andy Warhol. It raises an urgent set of telescoping questions. What qualifies as art? Where do we set the boundaries between high art and low? And how far can opera go and still be opera? Andy answers: anything, nowhere, and far out.

Opera Philadelphia and the Bearded Ladies, its creators, could not have chosen better artistic cover than Warhol for any kind of lunacy that crossed the stage. Once you've set the rule that there are no rules, transgression of vocal technique, compositional tedium, and narrative nonsense are simply part of the story. As Warhol said: "Art is anything you can get away with."

What was surprising about Andy, though, was that, even as it trafficked heavily in that dependable Fringe Festival commodity of coy self-indulgence, more than one performer sparkled, and the music itself formed gorgeous new land where the tectonic plates of rock and classical normally only grind. Visuals are an odd mix of Jorge Cousineau's well-crafted video images and one strangely amateurish prop of, if I am not mistaken, aluminum foil.

And yet, the music is stylish. Composers Heath Allen and Dan Visconti assembled a score of multitudes - alternately cheerful, pulsing, and groovy, sometimes embellished with operatic voices or recalling Kurt Weill, and often awash in rock-guitar acid. Several songs stand out - "Candy's Death Letter," a scene beautifully balanced between triumph and vulnerability by Scott McPheeters; and the closing few minutes, which move with unexpected psychedelic harmonic progressions as images play around with the real Andy, a skeleton, and the young one in the opera, played ably by Mary Tuomanen.

One of the production's great strengths - John Jarboe is director - is its pleasant disorientation. Who is really singing, who is lip-synching? Which sounds are electronic and recorded, which are coming from real singers and/or the real five-member instrumental ensemble?

Now that we've so emphatically entered the realm of accepting that the job of art is to entertain, it's easy to accept Andy as an enormous success. Opera Philadelphia says 40 percent of ticket buyers for the so-far sold-out nine-date run (a 10th is being added) have never bought Opera Philadelphia tickets before.

It might have felt edgy to some - the raw space on a rainy night in Kensington, the nudity, a cast of characters that includes a singing soup can and a stoned banana, and the feeling that you could become part of the show at any time. But let's get real. To find and support an idea or artist as radical today as Andy Warhol was in his, you'd have to unearth a foundation or other funders willing to support a piece that very few people would likely show up to hear, fewer would appreciate, but that nonetheless turned out to be a radically important innovation. Don't hold your breath.

pdobrin@phillynews.com

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