Monkey Business : Children’s Opera Based on Mexican Folk Tale to Be Presented Sunday at Bowers

Nestled in an all-day celebration of Mexican folk arts at the Bowers Museum in Santa Ana on Sunday will be a comparative rarity: the West Coast premiere of a children’s opera based on a Mexican folk tale. Opera Pacific’s community outreach arm, the Overture Company, will present Robert Xavier Rodriguez’s “Monkey See, Monkey Do” at 1 p.m. Admission is free, and the production has been designed to tour county schools.

“I take children’s music very seriously,” the 42-year-old composer (who has no children of his own) said on the phone from his home in Richardson, Tex. “I believe that you should never write down (to) children, but that you should give your best effort so that what you write, children will love their whole lives, and take their children to see.”

Rodriguez and librettist Mary Duren, 34 and also from Texas, found that like many folk tales, this story turned out to be universal. “We also found a version from Poland and other European countries,” Duren said. “There’s an image that is common to a lot of different cultures--a hat salesman going about with his hats stacked on top of his head. That’s the image that inspired the story.

“In most of the stories, the hat salesman loses his hats. He usually falls asleep and a band of monkeys steals his hats. Ultimately, he throws his own hat to the ground in disgust. By dumb luck, the monkeys copy him and he gets his hats back. But we didn’t like that.”

Concerned that the story might encourage stereotypes of Mexico as a sleepy sombrero land, peopled by lazy workers, they decided to “enhance the story,” Duren continued. “Our hero is shrewd. . . . We see him hard at work trying to sell these hats at every opportunity and not taking no for an answer, cleverly outsmarting the monkeys and becoming the hero of the village. I think we avoid that pitfall of stereotypes.”

Duren said she and Rodriguez also added a love interest to the story: Pedrito the hat-seller falls in love with Maria, the daughter of the organ-grinder whose monkey starts all the trouble when he runs off to find his own monkey girlfriend.

All ends happily. The organ-grinder winds up not only recovering his own monkey but getting more than one. “Everyone is happy and he blesses the wedding,” Duren said.

It was the first libretto by Duren, a composer, arranger, arts administrator and mother of two. The work, she said, was written “mostly in English, with some Spanish,” at the suggestion of the Dallas Opera, which has presented it dozens of times. The bilingual aspect attracted Opera Pacific.

“We thinks it’s important for our outreach efforts to make the community aware of the Hispanic contributions to children’s opera,” said Stephen Rapp, director of the company’s community programs.

Though it was written for puppet theater, it will be staged here by five live singers, including four children as a monkey chorus. “A lot of companies have the resources . . . to do puppet theater opera. We simply do not,” Rapp said. “But I really believe in the piece and feel it deserves to be given.” He said Opera Pacific contacted Rodriguez and his publishers and everyone agreed that the piece could be done with actors.

In a further modification, the Overture Company singers will be accompanied by piano instead of chamber ensemble, a substitution that Rapp said was made because of budget.

Written in 1986, “Monkey See, Monkey Do” was the first collaboration by Duren and Rodriguez, who had written four other operas and a series of chamber and orchestral works. Two Duren-Rodriquez commissioned works for orchestra and narrator have followed, along with another opera, “The Old Majestic,” about a vaudeville theater about to become a movie house.

Rodriguez recalls the composition as an idyllic time, “one of happiest in my life. It took about six months; the writing was very quick. When you have good words, the music comes immediately. . . .”

He and Duren “often sang the score together,” he recalls. “My favorite scene is a love quartet in which Pedrito and Maria sing of their love for each other, and the monkey and his girlfriend imitate them, physically and musically. And then the monkeys come back with this baby monkey.”

Rodriguez described the musical style as “sometimes atonal, sometimes involving (tone) clusters, 12-tone sometimes, in a synthesis. The important word is synthesis, which I feel is an important element in music today. I feel today many musical styles are being brought into one unified whole.”

But are there tunes? “Oh, yes,” Rodriguez said. “I believe it is possible to have it all--to be tonal, accessible, clear and, at the same time, be true to the post-Webern tradition. I think children are receptive to new sounds, more so than adults sometimes. (But) children are a difficult audience. They are not polite. If they don’t like it, they will scream and yell or leave. So you have to deliver.”

“Monkey See, Monkey Do” will be presented Sunday at the Bowers Museum, 2002 N. Main St., Santa Ana, as part of the free “La Jamaica” Folk Art Festival, which will run from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. The festival also will feature such dance groups as the Xipec Totec Aztec dancers and the Relampago del Cielo folkloric company, and such music ensembles as Los Gallos Costenos, Grupo El Herradero and Mariachi Uclatan. The festival is being sponsored by the Mexican-American Arts Council of the Museum. Information: (714) 972-1900.