Marilyn Monroe At the Opera

By Michael Walsh

Samuel Johnson, in a famous aphorism, once derided opera as "an exotic and irrational entertainment." That may have been true in London two centuries ago, when castrati sopranos warbled Handel in Italian before an audience of uncomprehending Britons. But during the past two decades, a wave of new American operas has put the lie to Johnson's dictum. One after another, composers have produced works teeming with powerful drama, accessible idioms and contemporary relevance.

Since the premiere in 1980 of Philip Glass's Satyagraha, which depicted the origins of Gandhi's nonviolent pacifism, operas have taken on such subjects as the thawing of the cold war (John Adams' Nixon in China), a horrifying mass murder (John Moran's The Manson Family) and the life and times of a fiery black radical (Anthony Davis' X). Throw in William Bolcom's 1992 McTeague, a setting of Frank Norris' wrenching turn-of-the-century novel, and Steve Reich's The Cave, a challenging examination of the roots of the Arab-Israeli conflict that gets its American premiere this week in Brooklyn, and you have something like a Golden Age of American opera -- boasting a body of work that ranks among the best, most innovative and most popular "serious" music of the past half-century.

Why now? For one thing, the collapse of the musically totalitarian 12-tone system has enabled a thousand melodic flowers to bloom. No longer do the words contemporary music mean two hours of agonistic screaming and clangorous orchestral Klangfarbenmelodie. For another, audiences raised on show-biz special effects demand large-scale spectacle, and innovative opera producers have risen to the challenge; not since the days of Meyerbeer at the Paris Opera have set design and direction loomed so large.

Last week the New York City Opera embraced the trend with not one but three premieres on successive nights: Lukas Foss's Griffelkin, Hugo Weisgall's Esther and, most provocatively, Ezra Laderman's Marilyn (yes, that Marilyn). All three were designed by Jerome Sirlin (who did Broadway's Kiss of the Spider Woman), a dazzling visual stylist whose fluid use of video projections instead of built sets annihilates space and time and gives his productions an exhilarating sense of visual freedom.

Sirlin's wizardry, however, has been lavished on a curiously old-fashioned trio of composers. The best of the new works is Weisgall's Esther, by a composer who turns 81 this week and whose fondness for outmoded, Schoenberg- style serialism remains unabated. The story of Esther's dramatic rescue of the Jews from the evil Persian vizier Haman, celebrated each year in the feast of Purim, is one of the Bible's most gripping tales, and Weisgall, working to a libretto by Charles Kondek, has told it well. Tunes, no; drama, yes. The stark and uncompromising Esther is a powerful evening of musical theater, highlighted by the electric performance of soprano Lauren Flanigan in the title role.

Griffelkin, inspired by Foss's childhood recollection of a German fairy tale about a little devil who comes to earth to find love and happiness, has been repeatedly composed, decomposed and recomposed over the past 63 years (the composer, 71, wrote a first version when he was eight). It is a modest children's opera whose chief characteristic is its inoffensive, generic amiability.

Laderman's Marilyn, on the other hand, is for grownups. The libretto by Norman Rosten, based on his 1973 memoir Marilyn: An Untold Story, concentrates on Norma Jean's notorious love life, tracing her downward spiral to a drug- induced death in 1962. Soprano Kathryn Gamberoni gives a breakthrough performance as Monroe: after this, companies should be lining up to offer her femmes fatales from Bellini's Norma to Berg's Lulu. The opera, however, is as much of a mess as Marilyn was. Rosten's lines (Marilyn to her half-sister: "How's your little dog Lollie, the one with six toes?") are frequently ludicrous, especially when sung to Laderman's plodding, semitonal noodlings. And the decision to make Monroe the only real character, surrounded by bloodless composites like the Psychiatrist, the Senator and Rick, an ex- husband, forecloses any dramatic tension. (Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio?) Marilyn's life was larger than life, but her opera is as stupefying as her film debut, Scudda-Hoo! Scudda-Hay!

Give City Opera points for ambition and for getting back to its all-American roots. Still, pace Dr. Johnson, the wonder of last week's tripleheader is not that the operas were done at all, but that they were not done well enough.