Controversial Opera Based on Walt Disney’s Life to Open in Long Beach

Phillip Glass’s opera The Perfect American about the life and death of Walt Disney is set to make its U.S. debut this weekend, opening at the Terrace Theater in Long Beach, California. Based on some real events as well as fabricated ones, the opera has been controversial for its portrayal of Walt. As the Orange County Register reports, Diane Disney Miller once said she was “disgusted and angry” with how her father was portrayed in the production, which debuted in Madrid in 2013, prior to Disney Miller’s death.

Despite the controversy, the director of the Long Beach Opera production, Kevin Newbury, told the Register, “It’s a balanced, intimate and complex portrait of someone we think we know all about, but don’t. He was a complicated guy; we know that from his work. His approach to storytelling was very sophisticated. He thought about death a great deal.” However, he later added, “Yes, there were a lot of dark things about Disney. Naming names during the McCarthy era, his contentious relationship with his animators, sexism in the studio. But in some ways Disney was simply emblematic of his times.”

According to the Los Angeles Times, the opera is set in the hospital during Walt’s final days:

The opera is set in Disney’s hospital room at the end of his life. Faced with mortality, Disney contemplates his life, death and legacy. As he does, the hospital room around him animates in the truest sense of the word.

Stethoscopes, lenses, plastic forks and prosthetic limbs transform into an owl costume or a Disneyland-esque animatronic Abraham Lincoln. Inside an illuminated X-ray box, the image of Disney’s cancerous lung morphs into an animation cel, revealing the skeletal X-ray of a mouse. During one musical interlude, doctor’s gloves become animator’s gloves as Disney is magically transported back to his Burbank studio.

The Long Beach Opera’s production of The Perfect American will open March 12th.