Long lunches have a way of repeating on you. Just ask Pip Walls and Henry Feltham, director/producer and writer respectively for Das Roq Opera, which opens next week as part of the Dunedin Fringe Festival.
Over lunch in November, the pair decided to embark on a "big and ridiculous" project, a production that would combine music, dance and multimedia.
"We needed to find one concept that could conjure up all those things. Then someone said to us, 'Oh, you want to do a rock opera'," Walls recalls.
Yet there have been reverberations even before the first power chord has been struck. Though Das Roq Opera's subject matter ranges from "mythic underworld to the Labyrinth to Rocky Horror, electro-funk to Bryan Ferry", it also contains an element of "Germanic scandal". And it is that which is making headlines.
A Sunday newspaper article, titled "Josef Fritzl - the rock opera", claimed the production was inspired by the case heard in an Austrian court this week, in which Fritzl was convicted of murder, rape and incest.
However, Feltham, says the "inspired" angle is a bit strong.
"There are a hundred things in there and that is just one of them . . ."
Asked what connection, if any, there is between Fritzl and his plot, Feltham provides a brief outline: "The character, at the outset, escapes from a life of being stuck away from the world and the rock opera is about what happens after that."
Yes, the plot deals with a woman who escapes long-time incarceration by her father, but the woman is not a victim of incest.
"There are probably thematic parallels - if you really looked for them - between the Fritzl case and any story that involves someone escaping from anything," Feltham says.
"I don't think people who bring their kids along are going to have anything to complain about at all. I think there is a big difference between crossing lines of taste and crossing lines of morality.
"I'm not too worried, honestly. I hope people will come. That's all I'm concerned about."
And how word spreads. A quick search of the internet reveals Das Roq Opera is now being talked about across the Tasman.
The Illawarra Mercury, a regional newspaper based in NSW, picked up the story in its "They'll be the judge of that" column. Under the subheading "Dungeon humour", it writes: "A group of New Zealand performers have smashed the boundaries of good taste by creating a rock opera inspired by Josef Fritzl, the man who imprisoned his daughter Elisabeth in a home dungeon for 23 years, forcing her to have seven of his children."
Feltham expresses surprise, but not quite (Rocky) horror at the snowball effect.
"Really? Seriously? ... Well, that's fine. I don't really have a reputation to ruin."
Though the Fritzl case might be current, much of the work for Feltham's narrative was provided more than 2000 years ago.
"I just thought, 'what's the easiest way to get a plot together?'. I kept thinking about Greek legend, where it's very easy to find a five-act structure. I took the myth of Medusa, pretty much. I up-dated it, turned it into a strict five-act episode with a plot arc."
It's not the first time Feltham and Walls have conspired on a fringe festival production. Last year they staged a small but popular dance show, Suspicious Rash.
"We really didn't do a lot of marketing or planning for that show and it was a hit," Walls enthuses. "It was sold-out at the fringe . . . so Henry and I thought we could pull off something big and extreme. We know a lot of people around Dunedin, great actors, great set designers and musicians, people involved in film, design, all sorts of fields, so we thought we'd do something ridiculous.
"Within two weeks, Henry came up with a concept and we pretty much had a script written. Henry and I acted out the entire script on video and gave a presentation to 50 people who we thought might be interested."
That was in November. This week, with just days before the show opens at the Globe Theatre, Walls is confident all the loose ends will come together.
"It's getting better every time. We change things constantly. From the original story conception to where it is now ... we are pretty impressed that we've actually slapped it together.
"Because we have such a large cast and asked people to commit a lot of time, you get a number of drop-outs. We've recast roles three or four times. Every third rehearsal something goes wrong, but that's part of it," Walls says.
"The six-piece band is amazing, absolutely tight. We started working with them and had to decide what we needed first, music or lyrics. Henry and I sat down with the band and came up with songs, then fitted lyrics into the songs. We had a timeframe of an hour so we knew we had 10 minutes per act.
"It starts off with an overture, then it's into a cheesy '80s TV theme montage. Then there is a German polka that turns into death metal. Act two starts off with a Hawaiian-Caribbean love song that heads into a Bryan Ferry or David Bowie glam-rock number. Act four is Leo LaDell's creation; he blasts off the roof with a gospel number. Then we have our cavernous power medley, similar to We Are The World, with all the characters coming back in. Act five sums up the story and starts off as a little love song, then turns into a power-rock outro . . ."
We get the idea. Sort of.
