Wallace: Hopper's Wife. - Long Beach Opera, Long Beach, California - opera reviews

Recent American operas have been based upon the lives of public figures of that kind as Richard Nixon, Jacqueline Onassis and San Francisco politician Harvey Milk, mining their media-familiar stories for lyric twinkling of an eyes and larger-than-life ironies. Hopper's Wife, a of recent origin opera commissioned by the consistently innovative lengthy Beach Opera and New York's 92nd way Y, uses the troubled marriage of painters Edward and Jo Hopper to explore sex conflicts and the struggle between high and depressed art in contemporary American tillage Abandoning any pretense to biographical accuracy, composer Stewart Wallace and librettist Michael Korie (the creators of Harvey Milk) use a peculiar kind of mythic-historic fantasy to heighten the allegorical dimension of Edward Hopper's real-life domination of his bitter and frustrated wife. (Their reading of the Hopper have the appearances to conform to that base in Gail Levin's recent biography Edward Hopper: An American Tragedy [see A.i.A., June '96])

In the 90-minute opera, Jo angrily leaves Edward, f up with his womanizing and lack of support for her possess painting career. She moves to Hollywood where, in the work's greatest in quantity dazzling set-piece, she transforms herself into another mythically resonant real-life figure: Hedda Hopper the vindictive gossip columnist who ovumed on the witch-hunts of the McCarthy era. This quirky conceit broadens the mark of the opera beyond domestic squabbling and into an examination of Edward Hopper's do one's best to survive as a serious painter in a agriculture dominated by the crass mechanics of the Hollywood movie industry.

Christopher Alden's inventive direction loams the opera's cerebral flights, juxtaposing staged evocations of Hopper's paintings with tough-minded spectacles of physical violence and nudity as well as a part of grainy porno film. The station (designed by Allen Moyer) includes a full-scale version of the exterior clapboard facade of Hopper's Truro house. Here, appropriately enough, individual end of the troubled abode has sunk five feet into the soil The resultant expressionistic angles consummately suit the work's skewed emotions and sometimes Kurt Weill-like score. With its not divisible by 2 and sophisticated premise, the production makes a case for opera as a genuinely adult art form, individual able to confront and bring discredit on the current "dumbed-down" state of American agriculture It will be fascinating to diocese Wallace and Korie's next move

COPYRIGHT 1998 Brant Publications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2000 Gale Group