Doo-Wop And Knife Fights

Arthur Miller looked positively giddy as 3,500 Chicagoans stood up and yelled at him. No, it wasn't a riot, but the final curtain call at this month's world premiere of A View from the Bridge, William Bolcom's operatic version of Miller's 1955 play about love and death on the Brooklyn waterfront. The Lyric Opera of Chicago bet big on Bolcom, giving his American-style grand opera a production worthy of Aida, and the horse paid off: View packs the theatrical punch of a double boilermaker.

"It's a kind of American verismo," Bolcom says of View, using the Italian term for such popular slice-of-life operas as Puccini's La Boheme and Leoncavallo's Pagliacci. Sure enough, the tale of Eddie Carbone (baritone Kim Josephson), a middle-aged longshoreman who lusts after his young niece Catherine (soprano Juliana Rambaldi), has verismo stamped all over it, right down to the climactic knife fight. In this new version, adapted by Miller and co-librettist Arnold Weinstein, View has acquired a Greek chorus that comments on the unfolding disaster, though the overall effect remains faithful to the original play. Think of West Side Story, only with the kids grown up--and angrier.

But there's more to View than switchblades and red sauce. Bolcom has refracted Miller's '50s angst through the prism of an unlikely source: Benjamin Britten's great opera Peter Grimes, in which a deeply alienated antihero confronts a band of small-minded English villagers who demand his conformity or his life. Incapable of sleeping with his wife Beatrice (soprano Catherine Malfitano) and tortured by his dark longing for his niece, Eddie finds himself similarly ostracized by his fellow immigrants--a situation that allows Bolcom to deploy his chorus to galvanizing effect. View is among the first American operas to take as a theme the immigrant experience, and Bolcom, 61, is just the man to forge a musical language appropriate to the task. A prime mover in the ragtime revival of the 1960s, he has long been up to his ears in vernacular music, lavishly stirring it into his classical compositions (McTeague, Songs of Innocence and Experience) and accompanying his wife, the mezzo-soprano Joan Morris, in delectable recitals of popular song (they do everything from Sondheim to Shine On, Harvest Moon).

But while View is sprinkled with pop (including a doo-wop quartet and a Puccinified version of Paper Doll), Bolcom has succeeded in smelting many disparate styles into a tightly unified idiom all his own. There are times when the openhearted lyricism of a Leonard Bernstein would have been welcome, but the lean, laconic score keeps the action moving, lending Miller's kitchen-table naturalism a freshening touch of poetry. Add in Josephson's star-quality performance as Eddie, the exemplary staging of Frank Galati (who directed Broadway's Ragtime) and Santo Loquasto's angular set--the Brooklyn Bridge as painted by Franz Kline--and you get a no-nonsense tragedy whose final curtain falls with the tight-lipped impact of a police report.

The triumphant premiere of View comes at the height of a late-century season of excitement over homegrown opera. Not only were new American operas successfully premiered across the country--among them Central Park and Lowell Liebermann's The Picture of Dorian Gray--but major houses finally started paying attention to the superbly stageworthy works of the pre-minimalist era. New York City's Metropolitan Opera produced Carlisle Floyd's Susannah (1955), while the New York City Opera presented electrifying revivals of Floyd's Of Mice and Men (1970) and Jack Beeson's Lizzie Borden (1965). Even Marc Blitzstein's agitprop classic The Cradle Will Rock is about to get a new hearing, courtesy of Tim Robbins' upcoming film about its stormy 1937 premiere.

In a way, the revivals are the happiest news of all, since American operas have tended to be staged once, then shipped off to the warehouse. That won't happen to View, which will be produced by the Met in 2002 (in return for which the Lyric, in its 2000-01 season, will borrow the Met's production of John Harbison's The Great Gatsby, which is set to open Dec. 20). Chances are that it's headed for an opera house near you. Though only time will tell whether it has the staying power of a classic, A View from the Bridge--to lift a line from another waterfront classic of the 1950s--is already a contender.