Sing Faster: The Stagehands' Ring Cycle

Although legions of weekend warriors believe that the phrase "it's not over 'til the fat lady sings" has its origins in professional sports, the reference is actually to a decidedly different kind of endurance contest: Richard Wagner's opera Der Ring des Nibelungen, in which the damsel in question--the big-boned Valkyrie Brunhilde--sings her final song and tosses herself onto a funeral pyre...roughly 17 hours after the opening curtain rises. Filmmaker Jon Else's Sing Faster, which offers a cinema vérité look at the staging of Wagner's Ring Cycle (consisting of four discrete operas), isn't the slightest bit interested in prima donna divas or scholarly analysis--in fact, the basic plot of the Ring is piecemeal delivered in layman terms by stagehands playing poker, discussing the finer points of the Rhinemaidens' dilemma (whose gold was stolen by a troll, setting the story into motion), not to mention the comely Rhinemaidens themselves. In between poker, weightlifting, basketball watching, chess, and knitting, the stagehands are called on to move massive sets ranging from rock mountains to fire-breathing dragons. The unexpected joy of Sing Faster is the realization that the stagehands' choreography is every bit as precise (beautiful even) as that of the performers, and while the point could have been made in a film half as long, watching the stagehands' mortal efforts below and behind the scenes is an interesting complement to the larger drama of the gods' travails center stage. Recommended. Aud: C, P. (R. Pitman)