28 days to the Doctor Atomic premiere! 

Through the last week of August, the M, N and Q rows of the orchestra section at the Metropolitan Opera were covered with sturdy platforms balancing a scattering of lights, Mac laptops, books of laminated mockups. Tech specialists conferred, murmuring into phones. Everyone scribbled notes.

“We’re in Act I, scene three,” Jerad Shoner, a technical assistant, explained in a low whisper. “So we’re somewhere in the desert outside Los Alamos right now.”

The Met was in its technical rehearsals for Doctor Atomic, John Adams’s opera about the making of the first atomic bomb that will have its company premiere in October.

The hall filled with all the bleeps and burps of mid-century technology. Side screens flashed with alternating projections of declassified government documents. An original diagram of the bomb appeared above everyone’s heads. Chalky rain streamed down invisible panes. One of the stand-ins, on stage all day to mark lighting cues, shuffled her feet.

“We have a bomb,” set designer Julian Crouch said.

 “In a moment you’ll see the bomb because it’s the next set up. And I’ve not seen it, actually, finished because it’s hanging up there. I’ve only seen photographs of it. So when it comes down it’ll be the first time that I’ve seen it. It’s probably not finished and we’ll need to do what we call ‘breaking down.’”

Crouch, who co-runs the English Improbable theater company and who made his Met debut last season as the associate director and set designer for Satyagraha, surveyed the stage and his evocation of a 1940s New Mexico desert.

“The bomb itself was a crazy looking thing,” he said. “Most bombs are honed through technology, but the atomic bomb was incredibly homemade. It was like a one-off. They weren’t mass producing at this stage, anyway. They used things like Scotch tape to tape things in. It’s insane. It looks crazy. It’ll come down and people will think it’s an exaggeration but it’s not, it’s absolutely an insane looking thing, like science fiction, like someone’s brain with wires all over it.”

The bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, nicknamed “Little Boy,” measured 126 inches in length, 28 inches in diameter, and weighed 8,900 pounds. “Fat Man,” dropped on Nagasaki three days later, measured 60 inches in diameter, was 12 feet long, and weighed 10,300 pounds.

The Met’s bomb, by contrast, is an estimated five and a half feet in diameter, made of molded plastic and affixed with wires and fake transistors across its surface. Technical assistant Jerad Shoner looked up at the hanging orb and estimated the Met bomb weighs between 150 and 200 pounds. But it had been carefully modeled after images of the original bomb. The wires and transistors were not approximate formulations but based on the real thing.

Suddenly there was a flurry of action on the stage. The stand-ins got out of the way.

“The crazy thing for us,” Crouch said of the mock explosive as it descended, “was that we made it in Britain. Then we had to freight it over without calling it a ‘bomb’ because of security. I can’t remember what we called it.”

“It’s one of those things that if customs sees ‘bomb’ on the clearance form,” John Sellars, the Met’s Technical Director added, “it might slow things up a bit.” The prop was dubbed the “flying sphere” for import into the United States.

“That’s a very beautiful name,” Crouch added, his voice drifting away.

The Met’s atomic bomb halted in mid-air at center stage, a silvery, glinting, wire-encrusted thing.

“It’s a good start,” Crouch said, climbing up to inspect. “We’ll make some changes, but it’s a good start. I like that bomb.”

Peter Gelb, the Met’s General Manager, got up on stage with Crouch.

“I’m thrilled. You always have expectations of how something is going to look,” he said. “This is even more extraordinary than what I expected. It’s a feeling of great relief and excitement.”

Is this the first mock nuclear device the Met has had in the house? “Of this variety, yes. It’s the first physical manifestation of the bomb. It’s fascinating that it looks just like the real thing.”

This entry was posted by Caroline Cooper on Monday, September 15th, 2008 at 10:01 am and is filed under Doctor Atomic Blog, 2008-09 Season. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.