Review: SF Opera's Tristan und Isolde

After drinking the potion, Tristan and Isolde, easily five hundred pounds in total, faced the audience and put their hands on their bellies. Pupils behind closed eyes searched for just the right expression of the pain of unearthly love. In clumsy unison, their little hands inched up their bodies, their fingers playing sexually upon their own necks, lips, and cheeks, until they reached the temples. Oh! such faces of blissful anguish! And then, slowly, tentatively, Isolde's left and Tristan's right hand left their bodies and reached out, like reflections in a blind mirror, and bumped. Ah, then there was an embrace such as between two children beginning a game of patty-cake!

In the end, after the high schoolers parried, poor Melot -- poor, dead, monogamous Melot -- lay curled like a little sleeping boy in the clumpy green grass of Tristan's castle.

(Jane Irwin was fantastic -- subtle, natural, and beautifully voiced.)

Go get 'im!

But chief U.S. military spokesman Maj. William B. Caldwell was more skeptical on Wednesday.

"I'd love to tell you we're going to get him tonight," he told reporters. "But, obviously, that's a very key, critical target for all of us operating here in Iraq. . . . We feel very comfortable that we're continuing to move forward very deliberately in an effort to find him and kill or capture him."

Fortunately, I do not have the means to hunt down and kill my enemies.

Review: King Arthur

I'm trying to decide whether I should go back to Berkeley this weekend to see Mark Morris's King Arthur a second or even third time. Once was not enough to absorb the orchestra, the dancers, the chorus, the singers, the costumes, the sets.

In the first moments, and especially when the bright red curtain raised to reveal even more bright red curtains, I was choked with that feeling of being on the edge of emotions. I could easily tip over and sob, thereby giving in to feeling but missing what had caused it. Or I could shove the feeling just below my Adam's apple and focus all my attention on seeing and sensing.

Very quickly -- possibly as the soprano came running on stage in a spring-fairy costume designed by Isaac Mizrahi and very high heels of elegant Martian glass -- my joy was tinged with the sadness that this moment would end, and I would eventually forget all that I had seen. I would forget the rolling fir trees, forget the spandex chain mail, forget the countertenor's choreographed arms, forget the little girl I'd seen last December in the Hard Nut, forget the scrim enveloping the forest in light fog.

In fact, there was too much to watch. From my seat, which represented an investment made quickly after a payday, I could see into the orchestra, over the stage, and into the wings. The Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra, playing on replicas of instruments from Purcell's time, was full of young musicians with a certain European intensity and severity. (A young recorder player watched the conductor unblinkingly through two movements in which the recorder does not even sound. The chorus surrounding the orchestra, likewise, was all eyes on the director.)

Onstage, the singers mixed nearly interchangeably with the dancers. They courageously accepted the challenges of Morris and Mizrahi, creating stylized pantomime, jogging, jumping, climbing, dancing a quadrille in trackies, heels, underwear, and in a refrigerator.

Purcell is at once boring and pleasing. His music is often more inventive, or perhaps more twisty, than Handel's. But both musicians are placed so far back in time, when Western music was still happy to play by the rules, as to be a little on the dull side. Add to this the complicated truth that the music of Purcell's opera (or pageant or masque or diversion) hardly bears reference to the King Arthur legends, and you will realize that this could be a difficult show to pull off in California in 2006.

And in truth the audience may have felt challenged. I overheard one lady wrapped in scarves at intermission: "Some parts are funny . . . some just overdone . . . some go on much too long . . ." I smiled. She was accustomed to being heard. I would not be heard as I walked outside among the smokers and air breathers, wondering what would happen once I returned to my seat, eager for more and sad that so little remained.