One Minute to Midnight: The Doctor Atomic Final Dress Rehearsal
Posted by Caroline Cooper on 10/09/2008“Who would have thought—an opera about the atomic bomb?”
“I’ve been dying to see this since it’s premiere in San Francisco.”
“I’m so glad John Adams is finally at the Met!”
Such was the swirl of commentary and anticipation as the house lights dimmed on the Metropolitan Opera’s final dress rehearsal today for Doctor Atomic. Straggling audience members found their seats. A bank of computer screens in rows M and N glowed. Leo Warner of Fifty Nine Productions, who with Mark Grimmer designed the projections for the production, murmured into his headset. And Doctor Atomic got underway.
John Adams’s groundbreaking opera about the making of the atomic bomb and the life of J Robert Oppenheimer opens with a flurry of roaring engines, clacking newsreels and the jangling of a 1940s pop song, all of which melted into the Met’s orchestra under the commanding hand of conductor Alan Gilbert. Scientists, partitioned in a tower of cubicles, furiously scribbled equations while military personnel gathered below, singing of their work to create an explosion “beyond our wildest nightmares.”
The leading minds behind the bomb, captured in Gerald Finley’s J Robert Oppenheimer and Richard Paul Fink’s Edward Teller, stalked the stage in square shouldered suits, puffing away on fake cigarettes and unfilled pipes. In the next scene, Sasha Cooke took over, languishing on her bed as the neglected Kitty Oppenheimer.
“Am I in your light?” Cooke sang, cradling a distracted Oppenheimer. “Am I in your light?” The set filled with mournful blue tones.
“Everyone’s been there,” Cooke said earlier of how she captured the heartache and isolation of the Oppenheimer relationship. “But Kitty and Robert were in love. You would have to be in love to follow a man that far, into that world.”
Looming above that world: a constellation of blackened debris, set designer Julian Crouch’s final rendering of a frozen explosion drawn from artist Cornelia Parker’s installation Cold Dark Matter. The fractured pieces spun and twisted in the air.
“It’s going well,” Crouch said at the intermission. “We engaged with the story a year and a half ago, but then I focused entirely on the set. Now it’s great to see it all come together.”
Outside, audience members for the invitation-only rehearsal mingled and purchased coffees at the bar. David Kanon, son of fictional thriller author Joseph Kanon who penned the novel Los Alamos, waited his turn in line.
“I love the subject matter of Doctor Atomic,” Kanon said. “There were so many emotions going on. It really captures the dilemma of science: it can be beautiful and we want to discover things, but it’s also terrifying. There’s no turning back.”
Kanon shook his head. “It’s like looking into the eyes of the devil.”
Sam Clapp of Young Concert Artists, which represents mezzo-soprano Sasha Cooke, was likewise in line for a refreshment. “Sasha’s aria was just incredible,” Clapp said. “It’s so exciting to see her in a larger role. She has the opportunity for a career that could go in any direction.”
Over by the stairs, a gaggle of teenagers from New York’s Lycee Francais stood taking in the Met’s starburst chandeliers. “I really like the music,” said 17-year-old student Paul Sara. “We’re studying the atomic bomb and the Cold War in our history class right now, so this fits in with everything we’re learning.”
Sara peered over to the open doors of the hall. “I really get the tension of that time now,” he continued. “I’m looking forward to the second act.”
Doctor Atomic’s second act, a rush of tension and debate (“Will the bomb ignite the atmosphere?” Teller sings “Destroying New Mexico, or the entire world?”) pulses with questions, moral dilemmas, the what-ifs of the nexus between science and policy, calm and chaos. The set brimmed with small diagrams and chalky explosions, the earlier visions of Grimmer and Warner of Fifty Nine Productions now refined.
“Things are going well,” Warner commented. “We’ve got a few things to work out before the opening on Monday but, then, it wouldn’t be fun if we didn’t have a few more things to work out.” The projected images of equations and lines blurred into a rough whiteness, conveying all of what Adams, during the intermission interview, termed the “mystery and romance” of science.
As the second act came to its thunderous conclusion, the final triumphant bang of the orchestra rang out over the electronic blur and hum of John Grey’s sound design, a blast that shot across the hall, holding the Met in sonic grip. The full cast of Doctor Atomic gazed through protective glasses across the audience, and into the unknown beyond.
The Metropolitan Opera premiere of Doctor Atomic is on Monday October 13 at 8 pm.