James Jorden pans the new opera about the rise and fall of Anna Nicole Smith. He grants that the spectacle “may not be up to much as a work of art, but there’s some very smart craft here”:
As the focus of the piece narrows in on the central character, both text and music take on a deliberate simplicity, with easy, obvious, single-syllable rhymes and Copland-esque folksy melodies trying to communicate in terms Anna might understand. The seductive little waltz song performed by the food in Anna’s oversize refrigerator is a clever touch: Operatic heroes from Tannhäuser to Tom Rakewell fall for sexy close-harmony women’s choruses, so why shouldn’t Anna succumb to the charms of cheeseburgers and gooey pies?
A little later, Anna’s son, Daniel (Nicholas Barasch), overdoses. Silent in life, he emerges from his body bag to croon a hip little pop tune whose lyric is simply a rundown of all the drugs the coroner found in his bloodstream. The grisliest part of the joke is that the kid was so pumped full of chemicals that a second verse is necessary to complete the list.
If the rest of Anna Nicole had risen consistently to the level of wit in these two numbers, it might have been a masterpiece. As the work stands, though, it’s utterly dependent on strong individual performances, and in casting the show New York City Opera mostly succeeded brilliantly.
Justin Davidson was totally unimpressed:
Opera is not really the supercilious genre its haters think it is, but if it were, this wannabe potboiler would be an egregious example.
There was something deeply distasteful on opening night about a gala audience in Brooklyn chortling at the primitiveness of Texas rustics and their comical drawl. [Composer Mark-Anthony] Turnage has expressed his fear that he unintentionally singled out its protagonist for mockery. He needn’t have worried. The opera paints over its fundamental misogyny by spraying the entire cast with scorn. There’s not a smidgen of tenderness or sympathy for anyone here — not for the unctuous lawyer, the toothless cousin, the doddering billionaire, or the assortment of grunting males, all cheered on by a Schadenfreude Chorus of contempt. Anna’s mother, who tries to act as the opera’s moral center, gets treated as a censorious grotesque.
Mitchell Sunderland slams the show’s viciousness toward Smith, insisting “it’s wrong to dismiss her as a joke or someone who was just floating through life like a Soviet prostitute in a Russian socialist realist novel.” Joe Dziemianowicz, on the other hand, commends the narrative as a seedy Cinderella story:
The two-hour opera is streaked with humor. But it goes deeper as an indictment of fame. Smith, an early reality TV star, is hounded by media and prying eyes. She’s followed by dancers in black unitards with cameras stuck on their heads — “Equus” meets “Mummenschanz.” Hers was a life observed, constantly. But never by Smith herself. She careened from one moment to the next — never even a little in control. Fittingly, Smith’s venomous mother, Virgie (a terrific Susan Bickley, who reprises her role from the London run), almost gets the final say. Her late aria turns her daughter’s story into a cautionary tale.
But fortunately, the creators do Smith right. They give her the last word in a line that’s naughty and nice. And exactly right.
The Dish 