Looking for something different to do on your 39th birthday? How about having a total stranger executed by impalement during the party?
What? Too macabre? Maybe you just need to develop a French sense of humor, the kind Emmanuel Chabrier had when he wrote his comic opera L'etoile in 1877.
Yes, the prospect of a tortuous demise serves as a plot-driving device in this work. And one of the score's best numbers includes a description of just how the king's ordinary-looking armchair can, with the turn of a handle, provide the unsuspecting sitter with, um, a sticky experience.
There are other sharp moments in L'etoile (The Star), as you can discover this weekend and next when the Wolf Trap Opera Company offers a rare production of the clever charmer.
There's also a great cancan-like item, for example, sung by the chorus when they think that the original impalement candidate has been shot instead - "He's dead, which is a real shame, but why cry over it? Tears would be superfluous anyway. Since he's a goner, let's not talk about him anymore."
It's that kind of opera.
L'etoile packs in a good deal of sarcasm and satire, all of it underlined by a witty score that bounces along on infectious melodies and scintillant orchestration. An opera with a "Tickling Trio" obviously deserves to be better known (the way the orchestra suggests that tickling is just one of the inventive touches).
It wouldn't be fair to call Chabrier a one-hit wonder, but it wouldn't be too wide off the mark, either. For a long time, Chabrier's primary claim to fame - outside of France - has been a tuneful, upbeat orchestral showpiece called Espana. L'etoile, one of nearly a dozen pieces he wrote for the stage (some of them left incomplete), provides a welcome reminder that Chabrier had much more to offer.
Although he started out in a law career to please his family, he couldn't be kept away from music or the cultural scene. He soon befriended some of the coolest people in Paris, among them poet Paul Verlaine and painter Edouard Manet (who did several Chabrier portraits), and became known as an ardent advocate for Wagner's operas - an avant-garde position for a Frenchman.
The smart, droll and talented Chabrier, who died at 53 in 1894 (probably of complications from syphilis), never did make a huge splash in the opera world. But L'etoile can hold up to comparison with the comic works of Jacques Offenbach.
There is as much to savor in the music, with its parodies of Italian opera and bursts of music-hall dances, as in the plot - and even the character names (including Tapioca and another that translates to "hedgehog").
At the center of the action is King Ouf, looking for a disloyal subject to execute. He settles on a peddler named Lazuli, but the king's astrologer sees fatal trouble for the monarch if the sentence is carried out.
That's just one part of the story. The other, of course, is romance, and that involves women in disguise, a botched elopement and other complications.
It's all a little bit absurd, and a lot of fun. In the end, the, um, point of L'etoile may be that, if you can laugh at pending impalement, you can laugh at anything.
tim.smith@baltsun.com
'L'etoile' will be performed at 8 p.m. tomorrow and Aug. 3, and 2 p.m. Sunday and Aug. 5 at the Barns at Wolf Trap, 1645 Trap Road, Vienna, Va. Tickets are $58. Call 877-965-3872 or go to wolftrap.org.