![]() ![]() The drama reenacts the legendary 1972 meeting between Nixon and Mao Tse-tung, both of whom sing rhymed couplets composed by the poet Alice Goodman. The critical whiplash was good training for the first major controversy of his career, which also happened to be his first opera: Even before its Houston premiere in 1987, Nixon in China was vilified in a dozen national newspapers and mocked by Tom Brokaw. Against this backdrop, a two-and-a-half-hour opera can hardly pretend to present new information.īy the '80s, his music reflected influences as diverse as John Philip Sousa, Liberace, and the Supremes, which caused some critics to dismiss him as a postmodernist and others to embrace him for that very reason. Sherwin 20 years to write and that seems to leave not a day of Oppenheimer's 62-year life to the imagination. Robert Oppenheimer, and American Prometheus, a 721-page biography that took Kai Bird and Martin J. The past 12 months alone have seen a deluge of major books, including The Bomb, 109 East Palace, Before the Fallout, The Ruin of J. Over the past 25 years, Else's documentary has been joined by enough books and movies to fill a fallout shelter. It will also be the subject of a documentary by Emmy-winning director Jon Else, whose 1981 movie, The Day After Trinity, explored the history of the A-bomb through interviews with Manhattan Project participants. Premiering in San Francisco and timed to coincide with the 60th anniversary of the first nuclear test, Doctor Atomic will later travel to Chicago and Amsterdam. Robert Oppenheimer and the making of the atomic bomb is transformed into grand opera for the first time.ĭoctor Atomic is the product of a six-year collaboration between composer John Adams and director Peter Sellars, whose previous operas together include Nixon in China and The Death of Kling-hoffer. I'm looking at the set where big science will collide with high art this October, when the story of J. Beneath those are plans for the tower on which it will be hoisted, and for the backdrop, a stylized Los Alamos complete with the Sangre de Cristo mountain range. Stepping into the foreman's office, Kotcher slides open a drawer stacked high with pen-and-ink drawings of the bomb. I'm on a tour of the opera company's scene shop, a block-long warehouse that used to be a steel mill, in one of San Francisco's last remaining industrial districts. Kotcher is the San Francisco Opera's top scenic artist, and compared with those jobs, conjuring a Styrofoam replica of the plutonium bomb detonated in the New Mexico desert six decades ago is a cinch. He has, however, built turreted castles and baroque carriages and more pastoral landscapes than he can count. This is the first atomic bomb that Kotcher has ever made. "We'll put on various dressings, and then it will get decorated." "This will all get coated in fiberglass," explains a sinewy man named Jay Kotcher, noticing that I'm not exactly impressed by his weapon of mass destruction. At the moment, though, it resembles nothing so much as an oversize throw pillow. Construction of the atomic bomb will be complete in just a few weeks.
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