The Daily Gamecock

‘Cassiopeia’ an ambitious space-opera musical

“Cassiopeia: The Cosmic Calypso” is the most ambitious space opera musical to hit USC in its history. It’s also the only one.

The play, the brainchild of fourth-year business student Pedro Lopez De Victoria, details the trials of a space crew that comes to face their own mortality.

Lopez De Victoria both wrote and directed the vehicle, bringing a singular vision influenced by a range of media, from Buck Rogers to philosopher Albert Camus.

“I think there’s something important about being a writer and a director ... There’s a lot of cohesion to the vision,” he said. “If I make it worse or I make it better as director, it is a further expression of what I intended.”

The play is his first major theatrical effort at USC, the culmination of his experience in music and passion for writing and the arts.

“I adore writing, I adore music, I adore theater, and for some reason, there’s a way to combine all three of them which is socially acceptable,” he said.

Lopez De Victoria is currently in two bands, One Two Skidoo and Casio Mio, and he brought that musical passion to the fairly different form of the musical play.

“We just raise hell and go crazy,” he said of his Casio Mio performances. “If we were to do a play with the same amount of energy, everything would break on the first night.”

Instead of a bringing the intensity level of a live music act, Lopez De Victoria purposefully structured his play to reflect both the freewheeling absurdity of sci-fi B-movies and the dramatic soul-searching found in many of his favorite philosophers.

Talking about the break at the show’s halfway point, he said, “There’s a huge mood shift when that happens, and it goes from this fun, light, kind of campy, irreverent comedy to this really profound existential tragedy.”

As for what exactly that central event is — well, you’ll have to see the play to find out.

For the first part of the play, Lopez De Victoria drew from Wes Anderson’s unique comic rhythms for direction and was inspired by a wide breadth of sci-fi that often features the genre at its goofiest: David Bowie, Buck Rogers, Cowboy Bebop, Space Dandy, Star Wars and Star Trek. For the second part, he took inspiration from Andy Kaufman’s depressive structuralism and brought the philosophical influences on the play — primarily Kafka, Nietzsche and Camus — to the forefront. The play as a whole is arranged very deliberately, a form important to Lopez De Victoria.

“I kind of wove the play together really carefully. It’s less of a line and more like a weird Chinese finger trap or a knot,” he explained. “There’s a lot of parallels between the paths the characters take and each other. ... I think if you do it right, you have the right pattern and everything falls into place. ... It’s stronger that way when it’s cohesively tied.”

Despite the freewheeling nature of some of its campier sci-fi influences, Lopez De Victoria had very specific thematic concerns he wanted to deal with, especially with entropy and decay, the transition from order to disorder.

“What I think is the coolest thing about entropy is that while what’s in the material realm falls apart — we get old, our bodies age — something invisible comes together. Our spirit, our soul, whatever, the innards of your sentient existence, it becomes more formed,” he said. “What makes human beings, I think, something incredible is that we can appreciate the invisible.”

Mostly disconnected from the drama department, Lopez De Victoria has been constructing the play with volunteers and friends, and the majority of the actors aren’t theater majors. According to Lopez De Victoria, their enthusiasm and connection to the characters has made the directing process easy and relatively smooth.

“It’s a pretty impressive human resource push,” said graduate business student Nathan Anderith, who stars as Cassio, the captain of the ragtag team.

Anderith, like many of the other cast members, was synced up with Lopez De Victoria’s vision.

“All the very strong structures and connections that were built in the first half of the play get destabilized and broken down toward the end,” Anderith said.

Lopez De Victoria looks at the play’s themes as a frank exploration of death and what it means to confront it.

“I got really sick, and my way of coping with that was like, I need to have something that explores and confirms my existence, and — it makes me sound so melodramatic by saying this, but every person has to at one point face their existence and the unanswerable question of it,” he said.

Wrapped up with the inherent darkness of the play’s central premise is the wondrous, terrifying expanse of space, which is, to Lopez De Victoria, entrancing in its mysteries.

“It’s the reason why we dream so beautifully,” he said. “Because humanity has always had that to look at.”


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