Sin City Opera adds its special spice to ‘An Incomplete Education’

Sin City Opera does post-nuptial fun with An Incomplete Education.

By Kristen Peterson (contact)

Wednesday, June 6, 2012 | 5:56 p.m.

Abstinence rings and Utah aside, finding a chaste couple on their wedding night is not entirely common. Nor is being clueless about sex, what with the Internet and cable television. But Sin City Opera ushers to the stage one such couple for a performance of Emmanuel Charbrier’s An Incomplete Education at the Onyx Theatre.

The one-act comic opera written in 1879 exposes the frustration of teenage newlyweds eager to consummate their relationship but uncertain what, exactly, that means. Advice is sought from relatives—a grandfather and an aunt—and eventually a tutor leaves them without the necessary information to launch the marriage.

Not to be mistaken for a dowdy romp eliciting equally outmoded guffaws, An Incomplete Education has its spice, particularly, we’re guessing, in the hands of Sin City Opera, whose “reinterpreted production” (in English) is placed in a contemporary time and setting. This is, after all, the company that presented Jacques Offenbach’s Ba-Ta-Clan deconstructed, garnering four and a half stars from Weekly reviewer Jacob Coakley and a slot in Coakley’s 2011 year-end list.