Nudity on stage — what’s the big deal?

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Whenever a new production promises on-stage nudity, you can be sure that disappointment won’t be far behind.

That’s because the hype-to-skin ratio is so astronomical these days that feelings of anticlimax are all but inevitable. The current media storm over Daniel Radcliffe’s upcoming Broadway premiere in ‘Equus’ illustrates the point. Judging from reports, you’d think the play was a naked-fest on the order of ‘Oh Calcutta!’ But in interviews, the Harry Potter star said he will be nude or partially nude for just seven

minutes. And he’s not the only performer baring it all on stage this season.

Soprano Karita Mattila goes naked (save for a skin-colored thong) in ‘Salome,’ which opens at the Metropolitan Opera in New York this month and will be broadcast to movie theaters nationwide in October. (In Los Angeles, it will play at the AMC Century City on Oct. 11.) And bass-baritone Daniel Okulitch strips in L.A. Opera’s ‘The Fly,’ currently at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion.

Again, hype trumps reality: Mattila is naked only for a few seconds at the end of her character’s ‘Dance of the Seven Veils’ number, and yet the Met’s marketing campaign (and journalists as well) have focused on the salacious aspects of Richard Strauss’ opera. For ‘The Fly,’ L.A. Opera has circulated a much-reproduced image of Okulitch in his birthday suit, crouching in smokey pod. In reality, the singer is nude for less than a minute.

In a phone interview, Okulitch told me that ‘nothing motivates you to stay in shape than appearing naked in front of thousands of people.’ Still, he said when the opera premiered in Paris this summer, no one made a big deal of the nudity.’Now it’s the second or third thing people ask about,’ he said. ‘It’s when other people make a big deal about it — that’s what you have to guard against.’

— David Ng