This production by the Marin Opera, directed by William Lewis and conducted by Hugo Rinaldi, marked the opera's first fully staged performance...

"Plump Jack" is in one act, and runs just under an hour and a half. It has a libretto cobbled together by Getty from the two "Henry IV" plays and a snippet of "Henry V" (unflattering comparisons with Verdi's "Falstaff" are forestalled a little by Getty's decision to avoid "The Merry Wives of Windsor," the main source for that opera).

The composer's notes tell of his plan to differentiate between the worlds of the court and the tavern by setting the tavern scenes to music and leaving the court scenes spoken. With much of the evening thus devoted to straight recitation of Shakespearean lines, the score itself doesn't end up having much impact on the proceedings.

Not that the music has anything particularly important to offer. Getty writes in a listlessly conservative idiom, stringing together snatches of melody that cling timidly to the text without attaining a life of their own. The orchestral writing - as far as one could tell from the threadbare playing Friday - is competent but unimaginative. There was little in the score that lingered in the memory five minutes after the curtain came down.

Getty's opera is a work of no particular merit and - appearances to the contrary - no particular ambition. Shakespeare's plays are great enough to withstand any use that can be made of them, whether by great artists or by workaday craftsmen; I think an operatic treatment of Eugene O'Neill by Getty would have been more worrisome. "Plump Jack" may not inspire enthusiasm, but it's too modest and negligible to inspire much outrage either.