Word: operas
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...stood up and yelled at him. No, it wasn't a riot, but the final curtain call at this month's world premiere of A View from the Bridge, William Bolcom's operatic version of Miller's 1955 play about love and death on the Brooklyn waterfront. The Lyric Opera of Chicago bet big on Bolcom, giving his American-style grand opera a production worthy of Aida, and the horse paid off: View packs the theatrical punch of a double boilermaker...
...there's more to View than switchblades and red sauce. Bolcom has refracted Miller's '50s angst through the prism of an unlikely source: Benjamin Britten's great opera Peter Grimes, in which a deeply alienated antihero confronts a band of small-minded English villagers who demand his conformity or his life. Incapable of sleeping with his wife Beatrice (soprano Catherine Malfitano) and tortured by his dark longing for his niece, Eddie finds himself similarly ostracized by his fellow immigrants--a situation that allows Bolcom to deploy his chorus to galvanizing effect. View is among the first American operas...
...they sound divine (ahem) and no doubt prepared Jeff for Superstardom. His background as a vocalist also allows him to approach his role in Jesus Christ Superstar as a singer who happens to act rather than as an actor who happens to sing--a perfect match for a rock opera, which demands an incredible amount of vocal prowess (much more than most of the musicals and light operas staged on campus...
...crew in saying: "I don't hope to influence how people think about Jesus; I'm just trying to entertain. The idea of this show is that we want people to feel that theater can be fun, that they're holding on to a ticket that's half rock opera and half rock concert, something that'll really get them excited about theater, a real adrenaline rush...
Will we now see Christ heaved up heavy, slapped on the boards, prodded slinking smiling mile by mile into martyrdom? Or in this rock-opera raging, ranting, kicking down the cross, song-swinging, shining in his armature of doubt, will this be Christ come again, come for the first time? Descended from thieves, tempted, torn, encircled by disciples and dilettantes, his love shining out from the ranks of the furious, the flaming, the fornicating...