John Adams' `Doctor Atomic' opens at Met Opera

John Adams' intense and fascinating "Doctor Atomic," given its world premiere at the San Francisco Opera three years ago, made it to the Met on Monday night. Rather than use Peter Sellars' original production, which also was seen in Chicago and Amsterdam, the Met created a new staging--a rarity for a work this new_ by Penny Woolcock.

She has done away with Lucinda Childs' hyperkinetic choreography and created a far more direct and effective narrative. Driven by propulsive music, the first act moves swiftly. And while the second drags during its hallucinatory middle, the countdown to detonation and destruction is tense and tantalizing.

Adams--who also composed "Nixon in China" (1987) and "The Death of Klinghoffer" (1991)--has created one of the more successful contemporary operas. Still, modern music is a tough sell, and orchestra seats that usually go for $175-$220 were discounted to $30 following a $500,000 donation by a Met board member. It's the bargain of the season.

Stripped of the running, leaping and pirouetting, the focus of "Doctor Atomic" becomes sharper. The contempt and sneering of Gen. Leslie Groves at the cigarette- and cigar-puffing Los Alamos scientists hisses like steam. The moral second-guessing by Edward Teller and Robert Wilson floats like a cloud over the cool, analytic fatalism of J. Robert Oppenheimer. Kitty Oppenheimer's opening aria, "Am I in your light?" becomes a dreamy counterpoint.

Before the curtain rises in Woolcock's production, a periodic table of elements is projected on a scrim and loud electronic sounds are played, as if bombers are overhead. After the music starts, photos of the Manhattan Project team are projected in three rows of 14 rectangles each onto a wooden set designed by Julian Crouch. The people behind the photos are revealed.

What appears to be white sheets form New Mexico's Oscura Mountains. Mobiles of debris hang above the stage. Rain and other visions by Leo Warner and Mark Grimmer are projected.

The Bomb--referred to as "The Gadget"--looks pretty much as it did in the first production, a sphere based on photographs of the original test bomb that was detonated on July 16, 1945. When booming recorded music fades at the end, the voice of a woman at Hiroshima begging for help and water in Japanese is heard.

Sellars' libretto is based on memoirs, interviews and histories; texts of works by John Donne, Muriel Rukeyser and Charles Baudelaire; the Bhagavad Gita; and Songs of the Tewa. Curiously, for a libretto dealing with science and numbers, the weight-conscious Groves reads from his diet diary and claims three pieces of chocolate cake totaled 300 calories and two brownies 200. Indeed, kilotons aren't the only figures that have inflated through the years.

Adams has created a score filled with color, syncopation and lush interludes. The most moving aria is Oppenheimer's at the end of the first act: "Batter my heart, three person'd God," with a text from Donne's Holy Sonnet XIV interrupted by urgent, frantic music portending doom. Oppenheimer named the test site Trinity because of that sonnet.