LA-based Pacific Opera Project has recreated the Mozart opera, The Magic Flute, with a Nintendo theme. The original opera was one of Mozart’s last works, premiering just two months before his untimely and mysterious death. The Nintendo themed performance sees Donkey Kong alongside Mario, Wario, and Link take to the stage.
While Shigeru Miyamoto has more or less confirmed that Super Mario Bros 3 was indeed just a play, the closest that Nintendo has come to showing its classic characters on stage has been with the poorly received 1993 Super Mario Bros movie, and more recently the more promising The Super Mario Bros. Movie.
Pacific Opera Project has changed this; as a group with the aim to provide "quality opera that is accessible, affordable, and entertaining," it has blended pop culture with Mozart before in Mozart and Star Trek, and Mozart and Scarface. They have even performed a Nintendo themed Magic Flute in 2019, featuring the characters Donkey Kong, Wario, Zelda, and Pit from Kid Icarus. The re-imagining of The Magic Flute goes by the title of Superflute and sees Link take on the role of adventurer Tamino, while Mario takes the role of bird collector Papageno. Tamino is sent on a quest to rescue the princess Pamina, in a story mirroring that of a typical Legend of Zelda plot.
The original work is considered to be quite complex and demanding of its vocal performances. While Link is no stranger to musical instruments, and the characters do fit quite well to the plot, the leap to such an opera may be considered quite a stretch culturally. However, the idea of the same kind of narrative being available across such a wide gap in medium does strengthen the argument for games to be considered a “true” art. This concept along with other strong cases, such as Bioshock impacting the idea of games art by using parallels to famous literary work, continue to make a bold case.
Elsewhere, players are making strides to bridge the gap between pop culture and high arts in the unlikely setting of Fallout. Fallout 76 players have hosted a Shakespeare festival where they have recreated classic plays such as A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Romeo and Juliet. These efforts, whether by players in game, actors on stage, or by developers creating the games, show that the world of video games has a lot of potential to communicate to an audience on many different levels and connect people in ways that may have seemed to be impossible.
Source: Nintendo Life