Any opera that opens on a young man, dressed in nothing more than his underwear and a bat mask and skulking away from DePauw's infamous boulder is clearly unusual, to say the least.
While a soaring overture by Johann Strauss II emanates from the orchestra pit, the young man sidles away, eyes beneath the mask darting back and forth with embarrassment as the onlooking students point and laugh.
This is the scene that signals the start of DePauw's newest opera: "DeBat."
Originally written and produced in German under the title, "Die Flederamaus," this operetta has been translated into English many different times, but none have been quite like this one.
"It came to me one night when I was over for a project in China. I couldn't sleep because of the Jet Lag, and I remember thinking about "Die Fledermaus," Joachim Schamberger, director and adaptor of DePauw's newest opera said.
"I had most of the ideas for this new version that night," he said.
Though Schamberger had already written a few updated versions of this opera, based on the English adaptations by Ruth and Thomas Martin, he was more than eager to see where this new twist-changing the setting for the opera from Vienna to Greencastle and DePauw's campus-would take the storyline.
"I always thought the plot would work very well in modern day times with the appropriate changes," Schamberger said.
However, while the score could remain the same, making sure that all the dialogue and lyrics fit the new setting was not easy. Though in the end Schamberger only changed around 20 percent of the lyrics, "I kept every word that worked with my version," there were entire arias that had to be rewritten.
For example, in both "DeBat" and "Die Fledermaus", a young girl named Adele has gotten off work for the night to attend a party for the fashionable and elite. In the original production, Adele worked as a chambermaid pretending to be nobility in order to gain access to this grand event. For Schamberger's version set in Greencastle, he had to completely transform Adele's character. So, Adele became an au pair for a family in Greencastle, sneaking off to DePauw's campus where she pretends to be a student for the night.
Aside from all these characterization changes, updates to Adele's aria in Act II, where she sings of her newly adopted status, were also necessary.
"For that aria, I had to completely rewrite every word of it," Schamberger said.
Adele became a student, singing of sororities and classes instead of dukes and earls as she did in the original.
In order to ensure that the newly reworked dialogue and lyrics took shape on a stage where the familiar settings could be correctly portrayed, Schamberger used "virtual theater design," or large projection scale sets, to take his productions to the next level.
"It helps so much when it comes to setting up these locations that people know. How do you build a set for East College? Well you can't, so you project it instead and then combine it with a set," Schamberger said.
The soaring planes, skyline views and photographs of the Green Center for the Performing Arts' Great Hall and the Greencastle courthouse, all depicted with the use of a projector, completely transform the Moore Theater stage.
"Joachim is amazing with the technology," junior Elleka Okerstrom said.
"The projections make you feel so much more inside the story, and I think it just looks so much more professional. You get a lot more bang for your buck," Okerstrom said.
Work on this production started before fall break, when the students auditioned. They were then given the dialogue and score to read through and work on over winter break, and returned in January to begin what junior Stephanie Sharlow referred to as "a Winter Term project."
"It's been a lot of fun," freshman Yazid Gray said. "A lot of hard work, but lots of fun. A great experience too."
Both the actors and actresses in "DeBat" and Schamberger have high hopes that this adaptation of classical opera will have a pull even for students from the College of Liberal Arts.
"I think this is a really good show to get the College of Liberal Arts students and other people who aren't part of the music school into the performances," Sharlow said.
"A lot of these stories are really timeless. They can be really funny. There's a prejudice in opera and people who say, 'the music is beautiful but the story is confusing, or weak, or weird," Schamberger said.
"I hope people will see this and see that it is not something old, antique and boring-this is really something that can be cool" he added.
Okerstrom agreed.
"I think a lot of the students will like this updated version, just because opera is something that a lot of people find very inaccessible, and this is us saying, 'hey look, you'll think this is funny; there are jokes in here that you'll get," she said.
"When you see this story taking place in your own backyard, not in Vienna a hundred years ago, you think, 'oh, this is actually quite spicy,'" Schamberger said.
Though Schamberger's updated storyline and technology will definitely draw crowds, his focus is on the music and the students performing it.
"This is really, really tricky music, and it sounds easy because it has this lightness to it. But to get it to sound that way is actually really hard work," he said. "I think they're all doing a very nice job."
Also, Schamberger added, the students are not just singing.
"It's not one of those operas where they just come out and stand there and sing; they jump, they dance, they fight, they I don't know what," he said. "I would like for the audience to acknowledge how amazingly our students performed this."