Opera for 10 cashiers, supermarket sounds and piano
The opera focuses on the inner lives of cashiers in a shopping centre: showing what lies behind their mechanical “Good afternoon!”, “Thank you!”, “Have a good day!”, and fake smiles. Faceless, robot-like shop workers found in everyday life are transformed into unique and lively characters of the opera. Their secret thoughts and biographies turn into short, personal dramas. The characters of different sales clerks embody universal archetypes, conveying the predominant social landscape. The libretto is a revealing mosaic of spoken, literary language and documentary.
The atmosphere of the supermarket is established through glimmering and buzzing installation of daylight lamps and environmental sounds, connecting the audience to the stage and the 10 cashiers. The set itself is very minimalist. Real goods – the recognizable décor of a shopping centre – exist only in acoustic and verbal form.
Monotonous beeping of each item being scanned is the key sound of the whole opera. It gets louder or quieter, but it is always present. Songs of the cashiers that accompany the beeping are as monotonous as the very process of shopping and selling. The music here serves to emphasise the thoughts of the characters, facilitating the hearing of their voices.
Creators of the opera try to avoid any moral or condemnatory suggestion: critical attitude towards capitalism is expressed through humour, irony and poetry. Mosaic of destinies of different cashiers is transformed into a chorus, a universal poem suggesting the pleasure of consumption.
Creative team
Concept: Vaiva Grainytė, Lina Lapelytė, Rugilė Barzdžiukaitė
Libretto: Vaiva Grainytė
Composer and music director: Lina Lapelytė
Director and set designer: Rugilė Barzdžiukaitė
Lighting designer: Eugenijus Sabaliauskas
Costume designer: Daiva Samajauskaitė
Sound engineer: Arūnas Zujus
Producer: Operomanija
Cashiers: Indrė Anankaitė-Kalašnikovienė, Liucina Blaževič, Vida Valuckienė, Veronika Čičinskaitė-Golovanova, Lina Valionienė, Rima Šovienė, Milda Zapolskaitė, Rita Račiūnienė, Svetlana Bagdonaitė, Kristina Svolkinaitė
Security: Kęstutis Pavalkis (piano)
In 2013, Have a Good Day! was selected by an International Theatre Institute (ITI) jury for a presentation at the finals of the worldwide competition Music Theatre NOW (Biennial for Performing Arts, Jönköping, Sweden), where the work was awarded the Globe Teana – Theatre Observation prize. In 2014, Have a Good Day! was awarded the Golden Stage Cross award for the best Lithuanian Authors’ performance and has also garnered
two prizes at the Baltic Theatre Festival (Riga, Latvia), as well as the first prize at the “Fast Forward” Festival (Braunschweig, Germany). The production was presented at a number of international music, theatre and opera festivals in Lithuania, USA, China, Russia, Latvia, Estonia, France, Germany, Switzerland, Ukraine, Portugal, the Netherlands, Italy and at over 30 major festivals and organisations, including Teatro Argentina (Rome), Munich Kammerspiele, “The Golden Mask” in Moscow, Maria Matos (Lisbon), Shanghai Dramatic Arts Centre, Operadagen Rotterdam and a number of others. Opera was broadcasted by BBC Radio 3 and Lithuanian National Radio. In 2018 LP with recording of Have a Good Day! was released.
Press
Clever, charming and quietly subversive. Whatever critique of capitalist entrapment and consumerist obsession might be implied is conveyed with subtlety and wit.
Steve Smith, The New York Times
A tightly constructed, multi-layered creation, its humor pierced by melancholy.
Alex Ross, The New Yorker
It’s like a mini masterpiece. It’s just nothing to take away, nothing to add – it’s very solid, very simple and very real.
Jonas Mekas, www.jonasmekas.com
It’s a tour de force of deadpan comedy… comes wrapped in a score of incantatory, almost liturgical serenity.
Justin Davidson, New York Magazine
…minimalist textures that evoke the swirl of everyday life – banality transformed into art. The opera is witty and poignant.
Heidi Waleson, The Wall Street Journal
Duration: 55 minutes
Premiere: April 11, 2011, Contemporary Art Centre, 4th Contemporary Opera Festival NOA – the short version. September 28, 2013, Arts Printing House, 10th International Vilnius Theatre Festival Sirenos – extended version.
In Lithuanian with English surtitles