LA Opera Put Singing Vampires Inside a 1961 Hercules Movie. Somehow, It Works

LOS ANGELES: LA Opera is spending Halloween weekend in a downtown movie palace with a 1961 sword-and-sandal film, a live orchestra and enough singing monsters to make the title feel almost restrained. Hercules vs Vampires plays the United Theater on Broadway at 8 p.m. on October 30 and 31. The event pairs Mario Bava’s cult film Hercules in the Haunted World with Patrick Morganelli’s original score and adapted libretto, performed live beneath the screen.

The setup sounds like a joke until the craft becomes visible. Bava’s movie already mixes muscular myth, saturated color and gothic horror. Morganelli does not simply place unrelated arias over it. His score turns the film into a hybrid stage event, with singers giving voice to characters while the orchestra follows action that was completed more than six decades ago. The result sits somewhere between opera, midnight movie and live dubbing experiment.

LA Opera presents Hercules vs Vampires at the historic United Theater on Broadway on October 30 and 31. Image: Codera23 / Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 4.0

LA Opera is presenting the work away from the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion as part of its Off Grand programming. That choice matters. The United Theater opened in 1927 as the flagship movie palace of United Artists, the company associated with Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, Charlie Chaplin and D. W. Griffith. Its ornate interior and gothic atmosphere are not neutral scenery. They make a better home for cinematic vampires than a clean modern concert hall could.

The film itself stars Reg Park as Hercules, Christopher Lee as the villainous King Lico and Leonora Ruffo as Princess Deianira. Bava, one of Italian horror cinema’s most influential visual stylists, used color, fog and elaborate sets to pull a familiar myth toward the supernatural. Viewers do not need to arrive with a working knowledge of Hercules or Italian genre cinema. The plot supplies the bones; the live music supplies the pulse.

Morganelli’s production has traveled through several orchestral settings since its creation, but each venue changes the balance. In Los Angeles, the theatrical history of Broadway adds another layer. Audiences are watching an old film inside a building designed for old films while contemporary performers reshape it in real time. That nesting of eras is the real attraction. The night is not nostalgia because the score refuses to leave the movie untouched.

The cast includes singers working across opera and contemporary performance, backed by orchestra and chorus. The music must hit fixed moments on screen, which leaves less freedom than a conventional staged opera. A pause cannot stretch because the film keeps moving. A dramatic entrance has to land when the image demands it. That precision is part of the spectacle, even when the audience is busy laughing at a monster or admiring Bava’s lighting.

Anyone expecting a solemn museum treatment should adjust. LA Opera describes the project as an unabashedly camp collision of opera and cult cinema. Camp does not mean careless. It means the production understands that Hercules wrestling the undead can be thrilling and ridiculous at once. The best version invites both reactions without apologizing for either. Halloween is the ideal date because the audience already arrives willing to dress up, suspend disbelief and enjoy excess.

Downtown will be busy, and the 8 p.m. curtain deserves a real travel plan. The United Theater is at 929 South Broadway. Drivers should confirm parking before leaving, while transit riders should check late-evening service for the return trip. Readers combining the show with other Halloween events should resist an overpacked schedule. My Chemical Romance is also playing the Hollywood Bowl, but Hollywood and Broadway are not one convenient stop in Friday traffic.

The event also offers a useful argument for what opera companies can be. A repertory built only around familiar nineteenth-century titles risks telling younger or occasional audiences that the art form belongs to someone else. Hercules vs Vampires keeps trained voices and orchestral musicians at the center while changing the door through which people enter. A cult movie fan may discover the physical force of unamplified singing. An opera regular may discover Bava.

There are easier Halloween plans in Los Angeles, and plenty of louder ones. Few can promise a historic theater, a Technicolor underworld and a live operatic battle with the undead. The strange combination is exactly why the production earns attention. LA Opera is not pretending a 1961 Hercules film was secretly high art all along. It is showing that artists can take popular material seriously enough to make something new, funny and unexpectedly beautiful from it.