LOS ANGELES – New York’s Gotham Chamber Opera goes Hollywood this weekend, bringing its production of Daniel Catan’s opera “Rappaccini’s Daughter” to Beverly Hills’s Greystone Park for two productions on July 20 and 21.
Based on Nobel laureate Octavio Paz’s only play, “La Hija de Rappaccini,” which in turn is based on the short story by Nathaniel Hawthorne, the opera is set in Padua during the Italian Renaissance.
It tells the story of a mad scientist who breeds a garden of poisonous flowers and sends his daughter Beatriz to tend it after inoculating her. A side effect leaves her toxic to living things, complicating her love affair with Giovanni, a student who has second thoughts when flowers wither at her touch.
The opera had its world premier in Mexico City in 1991, but for this production the original score by Catan is replaced by his alternate orchestration for two pianos, harp, and percussion.
After emigrating to the U.S., Catan was the first Mexican to have an opera produced in the United States when “Rappaccini’s Daughter” was mounted in San Diego in 1994.
He is most famous for the 2011 opera “Il Postino,” based on the 1994 movie by Michael Radford. Before his death in 2011, he was working on an opera of “Meet John Doe,” based on the classic film by Frank Capra.
After a pair of performances last June in the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens, “Rappaccini’s Daughter” will fit harmoniously in Greystone Park, formerly part of the legendary Doheny Estate situated off Sunset Boulevard, back among the palatial homes of Beverly Hills.
Doheny was an infamous oil tycoon and the inspiration behind Upton Sinclair’s “Oil,” which in turn inspired the P.T. Anderson movie “There Will be Blood.” The park was at one time part of the gardens surrounding Greystone Mansion, but was purchased by the city of Beverly Hills in 1965 and was dedicated as a public park in 1976.