If this city’s police department has its way, the party really will be over when the fat lady sings.
All summer, police have been frustrated by swarms of rowdy bystanders gathered outside a popular downtown Minneapolis nightclub after the city’s 1 a.m. bar closing time.
“This is more than the usual bar crowd,” said the downtown police precinct commander, Sharon Lubinski. “We’ve had extremely large fights, shots fired. We’ve tried concrete pilings to divert traffic, at times thrown a lot of cops at the problem, but that’s way too resource-intensive, to have them baby-sit a few hundred drunken people. We have to try something else.”
Her newest crowd-control weapon: opera. In a land still populated by Swedish descendants, arias from big-busted, armor-plated, horned Viking queens may soon attack the eardrums of the violently hip.
“This is a seriously violent crowd, one that I don’t think is going to like opera,” said Lubinski, who by autumn plans to blast music from large speakers hauled to the block on a police car. “We wanted to try this because it’s non-forceful, and non-labor intensive.”
Ironically, Lubinski got the idea to deploy such musical mace precisely because she is a recent convert to opera.
“I’m far from an expert, but something happened to me in the last few years and I went crazy over opera,” she said.
“I don’t want to send disparaging remarks toward opera. . . . It’s just when I tell people I love opera, the perceptions are that it’s not pleasing to hear, it’s discordant, especially certain pieces.
“For example, there is an introductory book about opera called `What’s All the Screaming About?’ ” Lubinski said. “To some ears, it sounds like screaming and screeching, especially a bad soprano. So given that, I thought, why not give it a try?”
While closing down the nightclub known as The Quest Club might seem like a more direct solution, Lubinski does not blame the club or its management.
“It’s not their patrons; they do a good job inside their club. It’s people from the street that their patrons attract once they are outside the door. The club owners have been very supportive of us trying to do something like this,” she said.
This is not the first time Minneapolis has used high culture to move lowlifes. A few years ago, the city began playing classical music to send loiterers away from a publicly owned parking lot.
Local opera leaders aren’t miffed that their art form is being considered as an audio cattle prod.
“If you look at the whole thing, this is inspired by a person who loves opera,” said Dale Johnson, artistic director of the Minneapolis-based Minnesota Opera. “We could be all artsy about this–`How dare you destroy the temple of art!’ But we think the more people are exposed to it, maybe some will like it and come in.”
The young, raucous crowds outside the club may not have an opera audience’s decorum, but they fit a target demographic.
According to a 1992 study by the National Endowment for the Arts, 30 percent of opera fans are younger than 35. And OPERA America, a Washington-based group, claims that for the decade between 1982 and 1992, the percentage of 18- to 24-year-olds attending opera increased faster than for any other traditional performing art form.
Johnson warned, however, only slightly tongue-in-cheek, that opera-as-weapon could backfire: “You have to be careful that you don’t overcharge an already overcharged crowd with music of such powerful emotion.”
For example, he noted that in the movie “Apocalypse Now” director Francis Ford Coppola used a classic horned-helmet selection–Wagner’s “The Ride of the Valkyries”–as accompaniment for a helicopter attack during the Vietnam War. “I imagine helicopters flying through Minneapolis trying to disperse unruly crowds,” he said.
Other suggested options: “If they want the crowd to disperse orderly, they might try the triumphal march from `Aida,’ If you want them to be seduced by the magic of the night, perhaps the end of Act I from `La Boheme.’ “
Perhaps because she is a fan, Lubinski admits she can’t quite decide which arias to aim at the crowd when Operation Opera rolls out. “I am not fond of a lot of German opera, but that’s just me. I love Italian opera, so it won’t be Italian,” she said.
A possible artistic compromise: an adulterated version of the real thing.
“This issue has generated more calls than any other crime topic, and some people have suggested singers who parody opera, which would be even better. Then it would be bad opera,” Lubinski said. “There’s apparently a woman named Anna Russell who does parodies. I haven’t found a CD of hers yet, but I’m going to try to locate it.”
