One person's idea of heaven can be another's hell, and Kevin Miller's spoof-laden take on a Greek myth promises to milk that idea for all it's worth.
When Orpheus' wife Eurydice dies in Offenbach's Orpheus In The Underworld she enters Hell, though her husband eventually strikes a deal to bring her back into the world. Miller's version for the APA turns the tale on its head and has Eurydice eagerly dashing to the Underworld to escape her philandering, fiddle-playing husband and to find an attentive boyfriend.
The Gods are in shock - Eurydice's actions could threaten the existence of the Greek tourist industry. So under the guidance of notorious womaniser Jupiter, they plan a little fact-finding trip.
Heaven's inhabitants haul themselves off their clouds and decamp like package tourists to Pattaya to check out the wild side. Not surprisingly, the Gods find Hell looking like a nightclub that wouldn't be out of place on Las Vegas' strip. 'No more nectar and blue skies, we'll have a giggle,' they chorus ecstatically.
'Everyone's bored rigid in Heaven,' says Miller, academy head of opera and vocal studies. It's all those eternal infernal blue skies and ambrosia. 'Down in Hell,' he says, 'they discover there's a wonderful time to be had.' When composer Jacques Offenbach first staged Orpheus in 1858, he set it in two short acts - largely because the production lampooned French society to the obvious disapproval of the strait-laced authorities. It quickly became a hit, so later he added four more acts.
Miller, who appeared in a Sadlers Wells version in 1960, has chosen the original form. 'It's slimline because we don't repeat the same song, we just head into the next one. It means we also get through the production in two hours.' To give a contemporary twist, Miller spent four months creating the show as if it were being filmed by a TV crew.