You’d think that anything written by the man who gave us “West Side Story,” “Candide” and “On the Town” would be worth at least a listen, yes?
Well, despite a top-notch staging Wednesday night by the New York City Opera, we probably won’t be hearing Leonard Bernstein’s 1983 tragedy “A Quiet Place” again anytime soon.
The lumbering, three-hour melodrama is a sequel to the composer’s 1952 mini-opera “Trouble in Tahiti,” a jazz-tinged tale of strife between suburban couple Sam and Dinah.
“Quiet Place” picks up the story 30 years later at Dinah’s funeral, as Sam tries to reconcile with gay schizophrenic son Junior and scatterbrained daughter Dede — who’s married to her brother’s ex-boyfriend.
Onto this lurid scenario librettist Stephen Wadsworth heaps incest, gay baiting, draft dodging and drunken driving, so it’s hard not to giggle when the chorus comments, “What a f—ed-up family!” Only in the short third act does the drama emerge with moving clarity.
Bernstein, ordinarily so adept at making pop sound important, seems here to be clambering at profundity, succeeding only in a pair of yearning orchestral interludes in the first and last acts. His decision to incorporate the lilting “Tahiti” opera as flashback material succeeds only in making the surrounding music sound even more generically atonal.
Usually inventive director Christopher Alden, stymied by Wadsworth’s Lifetime Movie plot mechanics, resorted to gimmicks ranging from simulated oral sex to 3-D glasses. Conductor Jayce Ogren kept the show on track, even in the most frenzied moments, though the orchestra brass flubbed a few difficult high attacks.
Standouts among a large cast were two baritones playing father and son. Louis Otey sounded firm and authoritative in Sam’s high-lying music, while Joshua Hopkins, in his NYCO debut, offered a fresh voice and sterling diction as Junior — even if his acting suggested more a moody hipster than the out-of-control psychotic described in the libretto.
With “A Quiet Place,” NYCO has done its duty of paying tribute to one of America’s greatest composers. Too bad this production seems less a revival than a memorial service.