Stage

...Korngold's romantic setting of Georges Rodenbach's turn-ofthe-century symbolist novel, Bruges-la-Morte, tries to capture some of the atmosphere of his source...

...Beyond score, beyond performances, the triumph of the piece was the staging...

...Herbert," by the way, was immortalized in one "Trek" as a generic name for an officious, soulless bureaucrat...

...And its scripts are--sorry, Harlan--more philosophically sophisticated than most of the originals...

...And then came Reagan...

...Sound familiar...

...Although the end of Rodenbach's book, in which his protagonist wanders the city, muttering, "'Morte...

...in which the two Klinghoffers shared space and action after the death of the character...

...Think about the central characters...

...Neither Jews nor Arabs come off particularly well in Klinghoffer...

...And better actors: William Shatner as Kirk always tried hard but always failed, whereas, Patrick Stewart as Capt...

...Jean-Luc Picard is as enviably gifted as in any other role you could think him into...

...But plus ~a change, right...

...She's America and, in "Star Trek" in the sixties, she's the Enterprise: in a word, us...

...waves...

...I assume that out of this bromidic background, the authors of the opera wanted to rescue the Klinghoffers, to transform them through death and suffering, but to many viewers (including the Klinghoffer daughters), the prologue demeaned the events...

...But where's Dorothy...

...That's a good question, as we coast toward the year 2001...

...Dorothy is the idea of the Republic that justifies the reality of the State at the same time she undermines it...

...Bruges-la-Morte," is a bit much after the fashion of the genre, Korngold's upbeat rescue of Paul seems arbitrary...

...The new work has none of the surprise, the exuberance, the wit of the earlier Adams-Goodman-Peter Sellars opera, Nixon in China...

...One needs a brain, one needs a heart, and one needs the nerve or, as Bert Lahr made the phrase forever his, "da noive...

...Anyone who has looked at the libretto of Nixon in China knows that Goodman is a pedestrian writer, but Klinghoffer underlined that fact by using supertitles...

...I do not think that the piece is anti-Semitic and pro-Arab, although it is easy to see where that response comes from...

...George Tsypin's multiple-level, erector-set skeleton for the ship was wonderfully startling when we first saw it, but its size and its static quality finally trapped the performers who were sent scurrying up and down to little purpose...

...It is as though the subject--as tragedy, as political comment--had placed a leaden hand on the participants...

...Just where she was in 1900, when L. Frank Baum wrote The Wizard of Oz as America was entering an unparalleled age of economic growth and greed, and in 1939 when MGM filmed The Wizard of Oz as America was on the brink of entering the still-after-tremoring cataclysm of our century...

...Dorothy is the one who just wants to go home...

...Prophecy or dumb luck...

...9 espite the negative judgments that mark the paragraphs above, there was much to admire in The D Death of Klinghoffer...

...Whatever librettist Alice Goodman had in mind, the song recalled for me Bernard Shaw's conviction that it is the idealists who bring destruction to the world...

...There were fine voices (Nixon alumni Sanford Sylvan and James Maddalena, for instance) and effective numbers although it became too pat for Sellars to drape the principals around the lead singer in the second-act arias...

...There is nothing in that scene that has not been presented frequently on the American stage, but the caricature is grating in this context...

...There is nothing remotely heroic about shooting a wheel-chair ridden man and throwing his body overboard...

...For more information please contact: Rev...

...After a decade of Reagan/Bush greed, vulgarity, and sanctioned-in-high-places cynicism, the Enterprise--and doesn't that name start to shine with the sad glow of our all-but-lost hope?--the Enterprise is still Dorothy, America looking for its center, which is of course its best possible self...

...Star Trek: The Next Generation" is much more high-tech than its precursor (which, let's face it, folks, was just a tad more sophisticated in f/x than 1938's Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe...

...How does opera and theater do...

...Rambo" is a nasty bully, made nastier by his holding a gun, and he deserves Klinghoffer's denunciation, although Klinghoffer sees the brutality as generic rather than specific...

...Conceived by Frank Corsaro (director) and Ronald Chase (films and projections), it used a double scrim on which pictures could reflect the city in fact and in Rodenbachish fancy, the accusing religious procession and the chaos that the troubled Paul carried in his head...

...As though the twentyfour-year-old Korngold in 1920 knew that he would end up in Hollywood, his librettist (the pseudonymous Paul Schott, actually Korngold and his father) has imposed a frame on Rodenbach's lugubrious tale, has turned it into a dream which allows the mourning hero to escape both his dead wife and his invented version of her evil other self and return to the living world...

...McCoy, ship's doctor, who is all compassion and who therefore never thinks before he acts...

...FRANK McCONNELL STAGE DESTRUCTIVE IDEALISTS 'KLINGHOFFER' & 'DIE TOTE STADT' ow that John Adams's The Death of Klinghoffer has come and gone at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, perhaps it is possible to recollect the work in tranquility, to deal with the ideational attacks that confused the reception of the opera...

...morte...

...And George Herbert Walker Bush...

...The twin choruses in the prologue--the exiled Palestinians and the exiled Jews--are supposed to set the noncommittal balance of the work (the creators hoped that it would reflect the complexity of the situation in the Middle East), but that balance is thrown off by the fact that the Palestinian chorus focuses on the loss of home in the immediate sense, the Jewish one speaks more generally...

...and Kirk, the captain, who must be brave and decisive, but who is forever prey to his anxieties and self-doubts...

...It's internationalized, perestroikated (a word I am proud to coin) now: even the hated and feared Klingons are part of the crew now, voyaging with us "where no one has gone before" --which, of course, is where you and I are always, we can't help it, going...

...Adams was using less of his signature minimalist tick-tick-tick here, going for something like conventional operatic form in many of the arias...

...McCoy= Scarecrow, Spock=Tin Woodsman, Kirk=Cowardly Lion...

...Spock, the Vulcan who lives by logic and fights down--or tries to--any human emotion...

...The cast that I saw was first rate except for Stephanie Sundine, whose Marietta, supposedly a dancer, moved so klutzily that one longed for a light-footed Morris half-circle...

...Edward Rothstein, in his dismissal of the work in the New York Times, said that the Israeli position "is collapsed into scorn of American Jews and anybody else without mythic claims on the world's attention," and he cites the chorus of Hagar and the Angel as an instance of staking the Arab claim...

...These people are friends of the Klinghoffers and presumably representatives of their society (although their name--Rumor--suggests something more metaphorical...

...This is the revival of the NYCO's 1975 production of the work...

...GERALD WEALES Refresh Your Mind and Heart: Take a Sabbatical A life of ministry is rewarding and demanding...

...Despite the presumed connection between the hijackers and their mythic past and the gentle presentation of Mamoud in a scene with the ship's captain, the Arabs are hardly designed to win the hearts of the 654: Commonweal audience...

...The new Enterprise even has a bar, tended by Whoopi Goldberg, which considerably eases my future shock...

...the second, it seems to me, is about, How do we preserve our differences and our individuality in a New World Order that wants to make us all the same...

...Even sty--and perhaps ~ , , A it is a comment on me rather than Adams, et al.--I had a more rewarding evening with Erich Wolfgang Komgold's Die tote Stadt at the New York City Opera...

...To counter-balance the many social and cultural challenges posed by today's world, it is essential to pause and renew one's personal vision and spiritual aspirations...

...Weston School of Theology's Sabbatical Program offers the experienced minister an opportunity to integrate theological and pastoral reflection with spiritual and personal renewal...

...J. Frank Devine, SJ Director of Admissions Weston School of Theology 3 Phillips Place Department C3 Cambridge, MA 02138-3495 Telephone: (617) 492-1960 Fax: (617) 492-5833 Weston School of Theology A National Jesuit Theological Center in Cambridge, MA 8 November 1991:655...

...And I must tell you, old symbol-shuffler that I am, I trust "Star Trek's" answers to that question a hell of a lot more than I trust anything offered by anybody currently in power anywhere on the planet...

...We are all victims of delayed stress over that war (the appalling Desert Storm being only the latest flashbacktwitch), and maybe it wasn't till after the war was over that we could afford to look full-face at the internal carnage we had wrought upon ourselves, and see in "Trek" some kind of reassurance that, even in the midst of the craziness, some of us still kept in touch with the human factor...

...Best not to look at Goodman's words, but to let them be swallowed by Adams's music...

...Too much of the time, however, Mark Morris's dancers repeated the same sweeping half-circle turns which pushed them toward clichr...

...Omar's invocation of the holy death he wants--an effective aria--is muddied by the fact that such a death involves holy killing, too, and Molqi, the leader of the group, sings that they are idealists...

...Beyond the ugliness of the central action of the opera, the Arabs are presented as disconnected, one from another and from the forces out there who presumably have organized their attack on the ship...

...Unlike The Death of Klinghoffer, in which the thematic material overrides song and story, Die tote Stadt can be taken as a serious lifeover-death statement or more immediately as a grandly romantic piece...

...So if the first "Trek" was really about, How do we preserve our humanity in a system gone manic...

...And the Klingons became our pals four years before Gorbachev and Yeltsin nailed that plot-change down in the real world...

...Otherwise the composer approximates the feel of the novel, his additions (particularly Pierrot's lovely song) augmenting the original...

...And though each of them already has what he "needs," they only get what they need when they give it to one another...

...Sometimes the double casting of characters with singers and dancers worked well, as in the effective business with the long cloth (shroud...

...The one who has to learn that the People-in-Charge--a very bad wizard, but a very good man--can't be trusted farther than the reach of the heart itself...

...To make matters worse, these choruses are wrapped around a sequence in which a stereotypical affluent American middleclass Jewish family is presented satirically, an odd introduction to the hijacking of the Achille Lauro...

...Homer knew it: a ship is always our world, looking for itself...

...It should, because it's just the configuration of the only truly original American fairy tale...