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Perhaps it seemed like a good idea at the time to the people involved, but an opera based on David Cronenberg’s classic 1986 remake of THE FLY somehow never sounded like one to this writer. Nevertheless, the project plunged into production last year, with Cronenberg himself directing, his longtime composer Howard Shore writing the score and playwright/screenwriter David Henry Hwang (who previously collaborated with Cronenberg on the film of his M. BUTTERFLY) crafting the libretto. After a world premiere in Paris this past summer, it opened at the L.A. Opera this month for a limited six-performance run…which is probably a blessing in disguise.

It’s not that the considerable talents involved in THE FLY have created an outright debacle. The production is visually impressive, with most of the action set in the lab where scientist Seth Brundle (Daniel Okulitch) is perfecting his teleportation device. The set and telepods are both similar to and different from the ones in the movie, evoking a slightly more retro, even Gothic feel (the stage version has been reset to the timeframe of the original 1958 movie), with A.J. Weissbard’s lighting creating the right somber mood. The special FX and makeup are also superb, with the monstrous full-body costume that Okulitch wears in the show’s final section nicely channeling the movie’s shocking images as well. As for the three main leads, Okulitch, Ruxandra Donose (as reporter-turned-lover Veronica Quaife) and Gary Lehman (as Veronica’s editor and former boyfriend Stathis Borans) are all excellent singers who work very hard to bring their characters and the libretto to life, although some of the supporting performers are not nearly as strong.

The libretto follows the movie fairly closely, expanding and changing it in some ways. Borans is probably given the most new material, as he reluctantly expresses his love for Veronica and also does investigative work into Brundle’s background. The most significant change is a subtle shifting of the narrative viewpoint so that much of the action is seen through Veronica’s eyes, making her more of the principal character and giving her a slightly different emotional arc. Brundle is relatively unchanged (so to speak), although his motivations are more confused than they were in the film, ranging from a yearning for love to a desire to rule the world. Veronica, in the end, offers him a chance for a kind of immortality that’s less ambiguous than the film’s original finale.

All these are interesting factors and/or additions, but they’re lost in the failure of the show’s single most important element: the score. Shore’s music for this FLY seems less like an opera, with towering emotional highs and lows and complex melodic architecture, and more like the generic scores heard and forgotten on Broadway for the past 20 years. I’m hardly an opera expert, but the music meanders along here, just sort of following the script instead of driving the narrative, and often sounding draggy and flat. It’s not helped by the libretto, which combines dialogue from the movie with endless exposition that’s often communicated through screens on the telepods. Information like “Teleportation complete” and “Transmission failure” is flashed repeatedly across the front of the machines while a 40-voice chorus sings the lines as the computer “voice,” creating an ultimately silly narrative gimmick that is less like opera and more like bizarre karaoke.

The crutch of using the chorus in this way—there’s one lengthy segment in the second act where the telepod screens and singers spell out a large chunk of the story while the stage is mostly empty—only points up the fact that THE FLY just doesn’t work in this medium. Shore is a great, Oscar-winning (for THE LORD OF THE RINGS) film composer, but he overreaches here, and it’s telling that when his music here briefly invokes a cue from the movie, it’s the most striking piece we hear all night. Despite Hwang’s credentials, all he’s done is create what amounts to an expanded version of the screenplay. Hearing phrases like “molecular fusion” and “Brundle’s fingers emit a milky white fluid” sung by a chorus is both odd and unintentionally hilarious, although this doesn’t seem to have been intended as a comic opera.