Word: viewings
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Census figures back up this view of many Asian-Americans who are still socio-economically disadvantaged. In 1990, Asian Americans in Boston had a per-capita income half that of whites and over $1,000 below blacks...
Arthur Miller looked positively giddy as 3,500 Chicagoans 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...
...kind of American verismo," Bolcom says of View, using the Italian term for such popular slice-of-life operas as Puccini's La Boheme and Leoncavallo's Pagliacci. Sure enough, the tale of Eddie Carbone (baritone Kim Josephson), a middle-aged longshoreman who lusts after his young niece Catherine (soprano Juliana Rambaldi), has verismo stamped all over it, right down to the climactic knife fight. In this new version, adapted by Miller and co-librettist Arnold Weinstein, View has acquired a Greek chorus that comments on the unfolding disaster, though the overall effect remains faithful to the original play. Think...
...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...
...while View is sprinkled with pop (including a doo-wop quartet and a Puccinified version of Paper Doll), Bolcom has succeeded in smelting many disparate styles into a tightly unified idiom all his own. There are times when the openhearted lyricism of a Leonard Bernstein would have been welcome, but the lean, laconic score keeps the action moving, lending Miller's kitchen-table naturalism a freshening touch of poetry. Add in Josephson's star-quality performance as Eddie, the exemplary staging of Frank Galati (who directed Broadway's Ragtime) and Santo Loquasto's angular set--the Brooklyn Bridge as painted...