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Programing a film containing opera, that is accessible and beloved, wasn’t easy. Amadeus is the obvious choice, but at three hours long it was decided to wait on that one. Moonstruck came up in a search, though technically there’s only one scene that features the opera onstage. The more this choice was considered the more you realize that Moonstruck and the opera are intertwined from start to finish, even if it’s never explicitly stated.
Released in 1987, Moonstruck stars Cher as Loretta Castorini, a 37-year-old Brooklyn widow who accepts a marriage proposal from her oafish boyfriend Johnny, played by Danny Aiello. Loretta has given up on finding real happiness after her husband was hit by a bus, and we sense that her relationship with Johnny is not passionate but purely practical. She’s been living in a multigenerational house with her parents and grandfather. Her Brooklyn neighborhood is pre-gentrification, where everyone knows everyone. She works in a funeral parlor and knows all the neighbors she grew up with. After the acceptance of Johnny’s marriage proposal, he leaves on a trip to see his dying mother in Sicily and get her blessing of the marriage. Johnny asks Lorretta for one favor, to go see his younger brother Ronnie, with whom he’s had a falling out years ago, and ask him to come to their wedding. All these actions are taken to clear up the “bad blood” in the family, so the marriage won’t be cursed.
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When Loretta finally goes to meet Ronnie, played by a young Nicholas Cage, she’s unprepared for the passionate, dramatic man who truly seems to have stepped from a tragic opera. Ronnie tells Loretta that his brother Johnny made him lose his hand, which made his fiancé leave him. He rages at Loretta, and she suggests they talk calmly at his upstairs apartment. When they arrive, Ronnie puts on an album of La Boheme. He tells her how much he loves opera, which is no surprise, because Ronnie is the embodiment of passion. He’s almost indistinguishable from the music he loves. Loretta and Ronnie begin a passionate affair, the kind she’s been trying to avoid for years, which she tries to end immediately. Ronnie isn’t about to let her go and makes her promise to go with him just once, to the opera. Every major emotional scene in the film is punctuated with the moon which seems to hold the characters in a kind of spell, wreaking havoc on their human plans.
Director Norman Jewison (Fiddler on the Roof and Jesus Christ Superstar) makes Loretta and Ronnie’s night at the opera the centerpiece of the film. They’re at Lincoln Center to see La Boheme and it’s clear the opera and real-life love affair merge in this scene when the star-crossed lovers on stage have a moon featured proximately in the shot above our actors on stage. That evening, under the omnipotent moon, Loretta and Ronnie are caught together at the opera by her father who is there with a woman who isn’t Loretta’s mother. Simultaneously Loretta’s mother (Olympia Dukakis) goes to dinner alone and winds up having a deep conversation with another man who asks to join her for dinner and walk her home. Will Rose have an affair of her own? All these events, unplanned by the characters, feel absolutely planned by the guiding force of the moon – compelling them to act on their inner passions.
Moonstruck is also a snapshot of working class, immigrant family life that, 38 years later, feels almost extinct in the digital age. The movie won three of its six Oscar nominations —Best Actress, Cher; Best Supporting Actress, Olympia Dukakis; and Best Screenplay, John Patrick Shanley, who based his writing on families he knew growing up in New York City. Starlite is welcoming three singers from Toledo Opera — Danielle Casos, Brady Del Vecchio, Rich Hale, and pianist Yura Jang who will perform selections before the film. Tickets also include your choice of an alcoholic drink or soda and appetizers. Get tickets at starlitetheatergroup.org.
