Opera Wednesday: JFK, the opera

DANIELA MACK AND MATTHEW WORTH AS JACKIE AND JACK IN FORT WORTH OPERA'S JFK.

It seems an unlikely proposition, an opera called JFK, and even after one ascertained that it was not a musical version of the Oliver Stone movie, that it was in fact set in Fort Worth, Texas on the last night of John F. Kennedy's life, it was still a bit hard to envision. But now it can be told, that the world premiere of JFK by the Fort Worth Opera justifies every risk taken, every doubt overcome.

From the outset of this modern composition, a mixture of the melodic and the atonal which was occasionally harsh and jarring but never crossed the line into Schoenbergian territory, the listener knows things will not end well. It's not just because we know the ending, either - as Jacqueline Kennedy (a suburb Daniela Mack) stands before a window staring into the Fort Worth night while her husband soaks his ailing back in the bathtub, as midnight passes into the beginning of John Kennedy's last day on earth, there is a sense of grim oppressiveness combined with a wistfulness, a looking back that becomes almost a valedictory on a life that was better than some but often fell short.

Jackie is burdened with Jack's excruciating back pain, for which she routinely gives him shots of morphine; torn by the death a little over three months before of infant son Patrick after just two days of life; haunted also by the additional memories of a miscarriage in 1957 and the birth of a stillborn daughter, Arabella, in 1956. So powerful are the nightmares caused by these memories, she occasionally has to resort to morphine herself in order to achieve a dreamless sleep.

For John (baritone Matthew Worth), too, there is unease under the dashing surface. His medical problems, certainly (including the adrenal disorder Addison’s disease, ulcers, colitis, and allergies), but also the memory of a favorite sister, Rosemary, who underwent a lobotomy in 1941, and the knowledge that his father favors older brother Joe, the Kennedy destined for politics until his death in World War II. In JFK's dreams he is taken first to the moon with Rosemary (the Sea of Serenity), where he is harangued by a belligerent Khrushchev and his Red Army minions; then to Cape Cod, where the memories of the moonlight cause him to relive his initial meeting and subsequent courtship of Jackie, and finally a comedic confrontation with Lyndon Johnson and his posse of rhinestone-laden camp followers, with Jack constantly having to caution LBJ not to withdraw his "Jumbo."

All the while, the Kennedys are ministered to by two outsiders: a chambermaid (Talise Trevigne) and Secret Service agent (Sean Panikkar) who simultaneously serve two additional roles: first, that of  Clara Harris and Henry Rathbone, the couple who shared the box with Abraham and Mary Lincoln the night of his assassination; and second, as The Spinner and The Alloter, two of the three Greek Fates. The Spinner, it is explained, unspools the metaphorical thread of life, while The Alloter measures out the length of that thread. The third Fate, The Cutter, is the one who cuts the thread at the end of life. The Cutter is unseen in the opera; he awaits in Dallas.

In Act Two, as John speaks before a crowd gathered outside the Hotel Texas in Fort Worth, Jackie is brought face-to-face with her future self, Jackie Onassis (Katharine Goeldner), who helps the young Jackie dress in her iconic pink suit and hat. Together with the maid, the three women sing a poignant trio as Mrs. Onassis assures Mrs. Kennedy that her husband will love her "every day" of the rest of his life, not adding that this life has only hours to go. It, along with the love duet sung by the young Jack and Jackie, are the show-stoppers of the opera, the two pieces that triggered spontaneous and long applause from the audience.

While Jackie leaves with the luggage, Jack slips into his familiar grey suit and, musing on how much his wife has sacrificed for him and how unworthy he is, he sings of how lucky a man he is, before he joins her for the short trip to Dallas. If there is any truth to the theory that the two Kennedys were growing closer, that fatherhood combined with the tragic death of Patrick had caused JFK to strive to become a better husband, it likely came about in much this way.

The opera is far from perfect, as is the case with most premieres. The scene with LBJ, for example, is very broad, to the point that the audience is encouraged to laugh perhaps more heartily than the material justifies. Johnson was, clearly, a larger-than-life character; the attempts by men in Kennedy's administration to marginalize him, and the dual insecurity of the two men (LBJ by his desire to be loved, JFK by Johnson's suggestion that the younger man is too inexperienced to be president) deserves a bit more gravitas than is given.

The triple roles played by Ms. Trevigne and Mr. Panikkar are also overly complicated. Without the pre-opera talk from the director, it would have been virtually impossible to link the two to the characters of Harris and Rathbone, and the tangential connections made to Lincoln's assassination are not only tenuous but unnecessary, cluttering up an already-crowded storyline. For those of us accustomed to stories of angels assuming human form on earth, the idea of the Fates assuming the identities of a heretofore unknown maid and Secret Service agent are plausible enough; adding another layer is not.

The use of the Fates, though, I found to be highly effective, for in the end the story of John F. Kennedy is a tragedy of its own. The assassination itself is never depicted on stage; instead, the Fates, having sent their charges to meet their destiny, watch on a television set while a grainy copy of the Zapruder film plays on the set's backdrop. The fateful moment, when the gunshots of Lee Harvey Oswald - The Cutter - fatally strike the president's head, is hidden from the audience by a piece of furniture; the reaction of the Fates as they see the unseen drama on TV, tell the story eloquently.

Thaddeus Strassberger's set design is by turns garish, sinister and intimate, and the occasional use of rear projection images, especially during the Jack/Jackie duet, is striking. And we can't really end without a shout-out to the Fort Worth Symphony, conducted by Steve Osgood. The musicians performed a new and often challenging piece of music quite capably, and the long ovation that greeted them prior to the start of the final act was fully justified.

David Little and Royce Vavrek, responsible for the music and libretto respectively, blend the ongoing narrative and the numerous flashbacks well, though it's likely that continued performances will result in a more polished presentation. Musically, the opera reminded me a great deal of John Adams' Nixon in China, in that it combines lovely melodies with harder, bolder modern sounds. In addition, both operas eschew for the most part the classical structure of arias and duets, instead choosing to present the dialogue in what essentially amounts to an extended recitative.

Ultimately, whether or not you agreed with John Kennedy's politics, whether or not you saw Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis as one of the world's most glamorous women (and the sympathetic portraits given here would encourage you to do both), this is really about of a young couple who rose to the top but never had the opportunity to enjoy the quiet moments that life presents in the subsequent years, when all is said and done and days are spent reminiscing while sitting in rocking chairs enjoying the late summer sun. The sinister sense of foreboding presented at the beginning is fully delivered by the end. That we're unable to prevent it from happening has frustrated artists to no end over the years (see: King, Stephen, for example), but that very inevitability, augmented as it is by our knowledge of the assassination's aftermath, is what compounds the tragedy.

One of the objectives of JFK, Little and Vavrek explained, is to remind us that the iconic figures of American history are also mortals, human beings with human lives. Flawed though it may be, their effort presents this in a very moving, powerful way. The story of John F. Kennedy is, as I said, a tragedy, and there is no better vehicle to present tragedy than that of opera. If it failed in every other respect - and, believe me, it doesn't - it would have earned its place in the opera world from that alone.

Retro TV Monday - This Week in TV Guide: November 23, 1963

This week begins as last week ended, with all programming being cancelled in the wake of John Kennedy's assassination.

Minnesota was scheduled to take on Wisconsin on CBS' college football game of the week on Saturday; instead, TV viewers saw dignitaries arriving at the White House to view the President's body laying in repose in the East Room.  As they arrived, their shoes splashed in the water from the torrential downpour that soaked Washington that day.  The game was postponed to Thanksgiving Day, though it was not televised.

Instead of Glenn Ford and Red Buttons starring in Imitation General on NBC's Saturday Night at the Movies, NBC broadcast the latest news from Washington and Dallas, including reports that a receipt had been found for the mail order rifle used to kill Kennedy.  In the meantime, future Vice President Hubert Humphrey talked of Kennedy's legacy and Johnson's challenges, and replays of Johnson's work day were shown late into the night.

On Sunday, the American Football League cancelled its entire slate of games, while the National Football League carried on as scheduled, without TV coverage.  KMBC, the ABC affiliate, was supposed to show the game between the home town Chiefs and the New York Jets from the Polo Grounds, while just a few miles away the New York Giants were hosting the St. Louis Cardinals at Yankee Stadium, a game that would have been on CBS' affiliate.  NBC, without sports on Sunday afternoon, had scheduled a repeat of Gian Carlo Menotti's opera Labrynth, the story of a bride and groom searching for the key to life, on NBC Opera Theatre.  Nothing could have compared to what viewers actually saw: the murder of Lee Harvey Oswald in the Dallas City Jail, the solemn procession of the President's body from the White House to the U.S. Capitol, where it would lay in state in the Rotunda, the images of people filing past the casket while funereal music played in the background.  On CBS, rather than seeing a Grammy salute to "The Best on Record" with Frank Sinatra, Andy Williams, Henry Mancini and Bing Crosby*, viewers listened to Dan Rather, in Dallas, talking about the man who killed the man who killed Kennedy, Jack Ruby.

*And Vaughn Meader, whose JFK impression made the album The First Family an award-winning smash.  His career evaporated after that.  I don't know if "The Best on Record" was ever broadcast, but if so I would assume Meader's section was cut out.

On ABC, Edward P. Morgan is heard to comment to Howard K. Smith, "You keep thinking, Howard, that this is a dream from which you will awake - but you won't."  NBC aired a commemorative episode of the British satire program That Was The Week That Was, a tribute to Kennedy.

Read the entire piece here. ◙

On November 22

One of my first jobs upon moving to Dallas was at a company whose offices were on Stemmons Freeway, just across the street from Parkland Hospital. As a matter of fact, I could see it every day outside the window facing my desk.

On days when I had to drive downtown, my route back to the office would take me down Main Street and then onto Elm, with a turn past the Sixth Floor Museum on the way to the Triple Underpass before getting onto the freeway. The Sixth Floor Museum is housed in the former Texas School Book Depository, and as I passed the building I would drive over two white "X"s that had been painted on the pavement.  (They've since been paved over by the city.)

Dallas is a city full of history, and historical landmarks.  Last Monday night I attended a premier of a documentary on the police capture of Lee Harvey Oswald.  The screening was held in the Texas Theatre in the Oak Cliff section of Dallas, the theater where Oswald was apprehended after murdering police officer J.D. Tippet.  Several retired DPD officers took part in a panel discussion afterward, including men who knew Tippet personally.  One of them, Jim Leavelle, would be familiar to anyone who's seen the iconic picture of Oswald at the moment of his murder by Jack Ruby - he's the policeman in the light-colored suit who's handcuffed to Oswald.  His granddaughter, Kate Griendling, was the director of the documentary.

The city in which we live, Irving, is home to Ruth Paine's house.  She was the Quaker housewife who befriended Marina Oswald and took her in after she left her husband.  It is the house where Oswald slept on November 21, the night before the assassination.  It's now a museum.  A street en route to the Texas Theater, Beckley, is where the rooming house was in which Oswald lived.

The Sixth Floor itself is a remarkable experience. The actual window from which Oswald fired his shots is glassed off, preserved as a diorama of sorts, frozen in time to look as it did on November 22, 1963. However, a guest to the Museum can stand at a nearby window and get the sense of just how close Elm Street is to the building; a trip to the seventh floor allows the visitor to stand in the window directly below the sniper's nest.  A walk outside the building reveals the Xs painted on the street - the point at which the bullets struck Kennedy.  Farther down the sidewalk is a grassy knoll, known forever after as The Grassy Knoll.

As my words suggest, I believe that Oswald was the one and only assassin of John Kennedy.  Even if you don't believe that, however, there can be no denying the power of standing in some of the most iconic locations in American history.  Though I do not consider myself particularly well-traveled, I have visited the homes of Washington, Adams and Jefferson; I've stood on the ground where the first shot was fired at the final battle of the Revolutionary War at Yorktown.  I've seen where the tattered American flag flew as Francis Scott Key composed the words to the Star-Spangled Banner, and I've dipped my hands in both the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.  Texas, home to the presidential libraries of both Lyndon Johnson and George W. Bush, offer future glimpses of additional historical artifacts.



Someone - I don't know who - once wrote that in Dealey Plaza, it is always November 22.  In all the times I've driven downtown, and driven past Dealey Plaza on the way to the Triple Underpass, I've never failed to see a crowd.  Some of them look at the Xs in the street, some stand on the Grassy Knoll (helpfully identified by a banner reading "Grassy Knoll"), some look up at the window where Oswald stood.  Last weekend we were downtown for the official lighting of the Christmas tree, and with all the festivities going on, lights and bands and face painting and vendors, there was still a crowd at Dealey Plaza.  It is a place, not so much frozen in time, but where time stands still.

And yet there's something about standing in the Book Depository (let's call it that for what it represents), on the 50th anniversary of the assassination of John Kennedy, an event that occurred (unlike those other events I mentioned) within my lifetime.  I don't have any memories of that time save the vague hint of a hazy recollection of a fleeting image which a three-year-old might have glimpsed as he was waiting impatiently for his cartoons.  That, I suspect, is what makes this different.

Standing inside that building, looking down on the street, hearkens back to a time that is 1963, and yet not 1963.  It is, in fact, my time, an era in which my first impressions were formed and first memories were captured.  It causes other memories, associated not by place or event but by era, to come to the fore.  It is not 1963 in Dallas, but the Sears store on Lake Street in Minneapolis, the building where I attended grade school, the sense of riding in my grandmother's car at night in the city of my birth, Minneapolis, as the neon lights marked out used car lots and Christmas decorations hung over intersections.  The 1965 World Series featuring our Minnesota Twins, the Texas tower shooting in 1966, MLK, RFK, the first Super Bowl, the moon landing - that's what I see standing at the window on the sixth floor.

It all sounds quite romantic, and there's really nothing romantic about it.  The Sixties were a crummy decade, full of violence and unrest, rebellion and license.  And yet, to paraphrase Charles Schulz' Linus, it was a good decade too, because it was the decade in which I was born.  At least that made it good for me.

What it is, is history.  Not just the history of John Kennedy's death, or for that matter his life.  Not even the history of this country, although it's certainly a major part of it.  It is the history of me, the history of us, of all those who posses the power to see that lifetime in the memories generated by a moment, a place, an event. It calls for reflection, the type lost to those who don't have much interest in anything that happened before their birth, or more than 15 minutes ago.



There are many who complain that too much attention is paid to JFK and his assassination, that it's a symptom of the narcissism of the baby boomer generation.  There's probably more than a little truth to this. Reading some of the things written in the immediate aftermath of Kennedy's death are, to be kind, a little embarrassing, full of purple prose and overemoting.*  Knowing what we do now about Kennedy's personal life underlines the situation, but the fact remains that even had Kennedy been a saint, the words written about him would have been overdoing it.

*Variously, a "great Christian," "one of our greatest presidents ever," "a kind, decent man," "a brilliant genius," and more.

But as Rick Brookhiser wrote at NRO earlier this week, those alive at the time of William McKinley's assassination in 1901 had only to remember back 20 years to the assassination of James Garfield in 1881. Many of  them might have lived in 1865, when Lincoln had been assassinated.  That made three American Presidents to experience violent death over the span of 36 years.  By the time of Kennedy's death in 1963, it had been 62 years since such an assassination, and very few remembered McKinley as anyone other than a figure in the history books.  Despite the Second World War, despite Korea, it was a generation ill prepared for the shock of a presidential assassination, especially one of a man who appeared as young and vital as JFK.  As Marc Ryan put it to me in our recent interview, while those past disasters might have belonged to other generations, the death of John Kennedy was that generation's disaster.  Just as there would be another generation scarred by Challenger and Columbia, and 9/11, and events we haven't even imagined yet. So I think we have to be gentle in thinking about that generation's apparent obsession.  As Brookhiser writes, "it will not be real to you until you have watched it yourself."

That doesn't mean that one has to subscribe to the more melodramatic, emotional assessments of it.  We don't know that Kennedy would have kept us from greater involvement in Vietnam.  There's quite a lot to suggest that civil rights legislation, passed as a tribute to Kennedy, might not have been as successful in a second Kennedy term generation of 1963.  In fact, as author Jeff Greenfield and others have suggested, Kennedy's scandals might well have come to light in a second term, and in that case we'd have an entirely different impression of Camelot.

Speaking of Camelot, I've written before about James Pierson's Camelot and the Cultural Revolution, which attempts to explain how the generation most wounded by Kennedy's death would up embracing the very causes which his killer, Lee Harvey Oswald, espoused.  Pierson thinks that Kennedy's death, and the adoption of the "Camelot" legend encouraged by Jackie Kennedy, was the defining moment in the collapse of the world as we knew it.  I've only lived in Dallas for six months, but it's been long enough for me to have formed a protectiveness about this city; while there were extremists among the right-wing elements in Dallas, there is no evidence that this atmosphere was measurably worse than some other Southern states - an atmosphere that cannot be understood out of context of the historical times - and had no influence on a Communist who hated America and sought to assassinate the Cold Warrior whose policies he opposed.

Dallas is not to blame, nor is America.  The Rolling Stones were wrong; we didn't kill John Kennedy.  It was Lee Harvey Oswald.



Idon't apologize for my interest in the death of John F. Kennedy, or some of the other news events of the past that have the ability to transfix me.  I don't consider myself a sentimentalist, or a wishful thinker, I don't whitewash the past or try to rewrite history.  I liked John Kennedy's style, and some of his policies, but I don't have much time for John Kennedy the man, and I have no time whatsoever for the attempts to sanctify him.

But I understand something of that need, the desire of people to attach a significance to his life and death. Because it's a way of giving our own lives and deaths a significance; if the death of a great man such as the President of the United States lacks meaning, what chance to any of us have?

Shortsighted perhaps, but also human.  So as we look back on these two days, November 22, 1963 and November 22, 2013, we look back at much more than what happened that day, and this one.  In remembering this anniversary, as with September 11, we remember the drama of human life and our part in it.  Thus has it been, thus will it always be. ◙

Conspiracy Buffs Wear Their Theories On Their Sleeves (and Heads) at Annual Convention

Attendees Dress Up as Favorite Assassins to Support Theories

(DALLAS, TEXAS – November 17) -- The 50th Annual “JFK Conspiracy Convention” wrapped up today in Dallas with the awarding of prizes in several categories, including “Best Assassination Costume” and “Most Plausible Conspiracy Newcomer.” The three-day convention, held at the Wyndham Love Field Hotel, attracted over 2,000 conspiracy buffs from around the world to exchange conspiracy theories, compare notes, and demonstrate the latest in assassination fashion.

Scholarly papers and presentations were given on a variety of topics and theories, all seeking to identify the true assassin or assassins of President John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963 as he traveled through a motorcade in downtown Dallas. For three days, the lobby and meeting rooms at the Wyndham was a colorful swirl of activity, as many of the participants came dressed as their favored conspiracy personality. Anyone walking through the Wyndham might find themselves standing next to any one of a number of “suspects,” including Secret Service agents, CIA operatives, FBI investigators, Mafia hitmen, disgruntled Cuban exiles, disgruntled Cuban Communists, and even familiar faces such as Lyndon B. Johnson, who succeeded Kennedy as President, New Orleans businessman Clay Shaw, and the late President’s widow, Jacqueline.

Mr. Cy Coe, 26, of King of Prussia, Pennsylvania, showed off his original costume, a shapeless, fuzzy green hoodie that he said represented the infamous “Grassy Knoll” from which many conspiracy experts feel one or more shooters fired on that fateful day. Mr. Coe’s outfit took second place in the “Architectural Feature” portion of the competition, losing the prestigious Stone-Garrison award to a man from California dressed as the Texas School Book Depository. “You call that a costume?” Mr. Coe grumbled, telling observers that “anyone can cut a hole in a box, draw a few windows on the side, and call themselves the Book Depository” and adding that the winner should have been disqualified anyway, since the building was obviously a “Potemkin Village” constructed by the CIA to divert suspicion from the shooter on the knoll.

The Abraham Zapruder award for “best plausible conspiracy theory not already in wide circulation” was given to Ms. Belle Freeh of Orlando, Florida, for her presentation alleging that the news department of CBS-TV was responsible for masterminding the assassination in order to boost ratings for Walter Cronkite’s evening news. According to the 19-year old raven-haired beauty, the network was desperate to catch up to NBC’s dynamic news team of Chet Huntley and David Brinkley, and realized that “only a national tragedy which would focus the eyes of the nation on a lone anchorman, making him into an internationally respected authority and eventually the most trusted man in America,” could save the network. Ms. Freeh was unable to accept her award in person, having left to catch an early flight for an upcoming conference in Roswell, New Mexico regarding attempts by the Illuminati, Opus Dei and the Freemasons to dominate the world economy .

Ms. Freeh narrowly beat out another popular theory by Dr. Runson Amebula of Higgins Bluff, Montana, who argued that NASA had been behind the slaying in order to preserve funding for manned space exploration after JFK discovered their plans to fake pictures of a manned moon landing set to take place sometiem before the end of the decade.

But not everyone was caught up in the festivities, and as the evening wound to a close a reporter noticed a young man standing alone in the corner, ignored by virtually everyone. The man, who identified himself as Mr. William Parker of Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and was outfitted in a white t-shirt and blue jeans, said that he had come dressed as Lee Harvey Oswald. “Nobody wants anything to do with me,” Mr. Parker sighed. “I’ve been accused of being a government agent, planting bugs in people’s rooms, and even having arrived here in a black helicopter. A lot of people told me they didn’t even think I was a real person. I’d have had better luck dressing up as Santa – at least then people would believe in me.” When asked if he’d be back for next year’s convention, Mr. Parker said ”no way,” and added that it had been one of the worst weekends of his life. “Next year I’m going to stick to the Trilateral Commission Convention,” he added. “Those people really know how to party.” ◙

Retro TV Monday - This Week in TV Guide, November 16, 1963

On Friday night's episode of Route 66, "After he stops Nola Neilsen from committing suicide, Linc becomes romantically involved with her - which disturbs the girl's possessive brother."  Meanwhile, on 77 Sunset Strip, "Chuck Gates has been sentenced to death for murder, but his father, big-time politician 'Boss' Gates, employs Stu to prove his son was framed."  And Bob Hope Presents the Chrysler Theatre presents John O'Hara's "It's Mental Work," adapted by Rod Serling: "Too long a bar owner, Ernie Wigman wants to sell out, preferably to his bartender Rich.  Rich has a yen for the bar; he just hasn't got the cash."

In sports, the Los Angeles Lakers take on the San Francisco Warriors from the Cow Palace, and at Madison Square Garden Mauro Mina and Allen Thomas face off in a light-heavyweight bout.  On Jack Paar's prime-time show, Liberace plays the piano while Cassius Clay recites poetry.  Cliff Arquette and dancer Gil Lamb are Steve Allen's guests on Los Angeles' KTLA, while on San Diego's KFMB, the Allen show features jazz pianist George Shearing and singers Howard Keel and Vikki Carr.

Friday morning and afternoon are filled with game shows, soap operas, matinee movies and sitcom reruns - Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. and Lena Horne wind up a week as the celebrity guests on Password, on Father Knows Best, "Bud dates a beauty-contest winner," and on The Doctors, "Laura breaks her engagement."  Among the late night movies, KTLA is showing Berlin Correspondent, in which "A daring correspondent (Dana Andrews) attempts to sneak out secret information," and KNXT's Late Show is The Big Lift, "The story of the American airlift in 1958 when the Russians blocked off Berlin," starring Montgomery Clift and Paul Douglas.

In other words, it's a day pretty much like any other day.  Except, of course, it wasn't.

Read the rest of the article here. ◙

Dallas to Commemorate JFK Anniversary with "Motorcade" Through Downtown

President, Texas Governor Also Invited to Attend

(DALLAS, TX - November 13)  The The city of Dallas announced plans today to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy with a parade through downtown Dallas. President and Mrs. Obama, as well as Texas Governor and Mrs. Perry, have been invited to take part in the “motorcade,” which will begin at Dallas Love Field airport and conclude with a luncheon at Market Center, formerly known as the Dallas Trade Mart.

The announcement by city leaders appeared to mark an end to a bitter dispute between liberal and conservative anniversary committees which had threatened to split the Dallas civic community in two.  Extending invitations to the President and Governor was seen as a fence-mending effort to bring the two factions together for the good of the city.

Path the "motorcade" will take

Dean Buckler, in charge of logistics for the November 22 event, said the “motorcade” would begin at approximately 11:30am, winding its way down Main Street in the downtown area and passing under a so-called “triple underpass” to Market Center, where the luncheon is expected to begin at 12:30pm.

“We think this is an outstanding opportunity for everyone to come together to pay tribute to an unforgettable moment in our city’s history,” Buckler told reporters at a press conference. “There will be many good areas for the public to congregate in order to see the various dignitaries as they drive through the city. People at work will be able to watch from office windows that overlook the route, and there is a sort of grassy hill or knoll downtown that offers an excellent view of the parade for those who wish to stand.”  Weather permitting, the dignitaries will travel in open cars which the city has borrowed from a local dealership, in order for people to get a better look.

The weekend’s events will conclude with a ceremony Sunday morning beginning in the garage of the parking lot at Dallas City Hall. The brief march will wind up at the County Jail, “barring any kind of unforeseen interruption,” Buckler said.

Hard to picture them as operas...

If you’re like me (and goodness knows, you should be), you probably can’t count the number of times you’ve sat at home watching The Manchurian Candidate on DVD and thinking to yourself, “This movie isn’t bad, but I’d really like to see it as an opera!” If you have had that thought (and I confess, I haven’t), the Minnesota Opera has heard you:  "The Minnesota Opera is commissioning a work based on The Manchurian Candidate, the 1959 political thriller that also was adapted into two movies...The new opera is scheduled to be performed in the 2014-15 season."

In the game of operatic-political one-upmanship, the Fort Worth Opera isn’t taking this lying down: Fort Worth Opera commissions work about JFK’s final day.

I’m not entirely sure what to think of these two developments, although I suspect they’ll either be works of genius or complete train wrecks. Of the two, I lean slightly toward the JFK opera, based solely on the success of John Adams’ Nixon in China. I would never have thought that would make a successful opera, let alone that I would have found it strangely affecting, and to that point it would seem that the story of JFK’s last day lends itself structurally and dramatically to a more compelling story.

I'm more leery when it comes to The Manchurian Candidate, though. First of all, unlike JFK, it’s a work of fiction, and whereas you can interpret many facets of a real-life story (precisely because there are so many of them), an existing work of fiction has a much narrower frame of reference with which to work. You can cite the fact that Candidate has already existed as a book and two different movies, but in doing so you invite the second challenge: the iconic status of the original 1962 movie, which starred Frank Sinatra, Lawrence Harvey and Angela Lansbury. I haven’t seen the Denzel Washington/Meryl Streep remake, so it might well have stood on its own as a reimagination of the story*, but the original casts a shadow that’s very hard to get out from under.  As Terry Teachout recently said about such situations, "it's all but impossible to survive the comparison game."

*The original wasn't always faithful to the book either, but it got all the important things right.

Then there’s John Frankenheimer’s imaginative direction of the original, especially the famous “garden party” scene. How that winds up in the movie is difficult for me to imagine. Not impossible, mind you – just difficult. Very difficult.

But who knows? I’ve been wrong before (many times), and I’ll be wrong again (many times, which, come to think of it, is a reason you might not want to be like me after all). Candidate does come with solid credentials: composer Kevin Puts, who won the Pulitzer for his opera Silent Night, also done for Minnesota. I could be just as surprised by this as I was by Nixon in China. We’ll have to see.

I can’t help but think though, and not for the last time, that if it’s political opera you want why not remount something like Menotti’s The Consul, as timeless as they come? Or you could look to an opera that deserves to reemerge on the scene: Pizzetti's Assassino Nella Cattedrale, his interpretation of Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral.  Having just seen this, I'll have more thoughts to share in an upcoming piece.

***

Bobby passes along a sad note on a loss to the opera community:

Shanghai-born mezzo Zheng Cao, 46, died last Thursday night at her San Francisco home after a long battle with cancer.  Her roles include "Madama Butterfly," "Idomeneo," "The Mother of Us All," and "The Bonesetter's Daughter."  She is survived by Dr. David Larson, her parents, and a sister. ◙