False Dawn.(Doctor Atomic)(Theater review)

I first heard John Adams's "Doctor Atomic"--an opera set in the days and hours leading up to the first nuclear test, on July 16, 1945--while driving toward the patch of New Mexico desert where the detonation took place. In the course of chronicling the first production of "Atomic," at the San Francisco Opera in 2005, I had arranged to visit the Trinity site, and brought with me the composer's computer realization of his score. An eerie trip ensued. Even as the hot gleam of the highway gave way to desolate roads and fenced-off military zones, Adams's characteristic musical gestures--the rich-hued harmonies and bopping rhythms that have made repertory items of "Harmonielehre," "Nixon in China," and "Short Ride in a Fast Machine"--disintegrated into broken clockwork rhythms, acid harmonies, and electronic noise.

Rehearsals for the premiere revealed "Atomic" to be not only an ominous score but also an uncommonly beautiful one. Scene after scene glows with strange energy. There is an inexplicably lovely choral ode to the bomb's thirty-two-pointed explosive shell, with unison female voices floating above lush string-and-wind chords and glitterings of chimes and celesta. J. Robert Oppenheimer, the leader of the atomic project, and Kitty, his brilliant, alcoholic wife, sing sumptuous duets over an orchestra steeped in the decadent glamour of Wagner and Debussy. Oppenheimer's central aria, a setting of the John Donne sonnet "Batter my heart, three-person'd God," has a stark Renaissance eloquence, its melody a single taut wire. The night of the countdown is taken up with a hallucinatory sequence of convulsive choruses, lurching dances, and truncated lyric flights. After the first run-through with singers and orchestra, it seemed clear that "Doctor Atomic" was Adams's most formidable achievement to date.

Staging the opera, though, has proved a challenge. The director of the premiere was Peter Sellars, who has helped to create all of Adams's stage works from "Nixon" onward. Sellars also devised the libretto, sometimes basing the dialogue on the documentary record and sometimes fashioning interior monologues from Oppenheimer's favorite poets. (The physicist had the Donne sonnet in mind--"break, blow, burn, and make me new"--when he called the site Trinity.) The inaugural staging likewise wavered between literalism and fantasy. A replica of the bomb hung over the stage, and authentic-looking gizmos were scattered around the desert camp, but dancers wove through them, enacting the bustle of research, the instability of the weather, and the hazards of radiation. The action at Trinity was intercut with glimpses of Kitty Oppenheimer drinking herself into a visionary stupor back at Los Alamos; Native Americans wandered on and off, delivering apocalyptic prophecies. The result flirted with chaos, but it matched the unruly power of the score. As often with Sellars, the production evolved as it went from city to city. A newly released DVD, filmed at the Netherlands Opera last year, refines yet further the director's vision, with closeups giving emotional focus to those whirling tableaux.

Three years after the premiere, "Atomic" has arrived at the Metropolitan Opera--but not, curiously, in the Sellars staging. Peter Gelb, the Met's general manager, admired the music, but asked Sellars for changes that the director refused to carry out. (Relations between the two have since been repaired: Sellars is slated to direct "Nixon" at the Met, in the 2010-11 season.) So Gelb turned to Penny Woolcock, a British filmmaker who had made a tensely absorbing television adaptation of Adams's second opera, the terrorist drama "The Death of Klinghoffer." The choice seemed sound: gritty realism would be a plausible alternative to Sellars's impassioned surrealism.

Alas, it doesn't quite work. Woolcock's production comes across more as an anxious revision of the Sellars than as an independent piece. It is simpler in conception, with no dancers in sight and considerably less frenzy onstage. The sets, by Julian Crouch, are dominated by walls of cubicles in which the physicists are seen scribbling on chalkboards and catching naps. Digital projections show mathematical equations, stormy weather, and maps of Japanese bombing targets. Minatory ranks of Native American warriors confront the audience. As before, the bomb ...