Geoffrey O’Brien is impressed by millennial composer Nico Muhly’s new opera, Two Boys, a whodunnit set in early 2001 and centered around the intrigue of IMs:
It is hard to imagine anything less songlike than the terse and truncated utterances of an anonymous Internet chat room, or indeed of an environment less suggestive of music than the Internet itself. The Net’s openness to an infinity of destinations seems to encourage a mood of disembodiment and isolation, at least as rendered in this opera. … Two Boys challenges itself to find music in that multiconnected zone of disconnection.
The premise here—the inexplicable stabbing of a young boy by a slightly older boy he met online—is altogether grim, an anecdote (apparently, as they say in movies, “based on a true story”) that could almost serve as a cautionary tale for parents wary of their children’s computer use. The parents here are as clueless as they can be, unsurprisingly since we are at the turn of the twenty-first century, that remote period, in an implicitly drab and emotionally worn-out English urban milieu.
Anne Midgette came away less impressed:
[Muhly’s] most ambitious and innovative goal, in “Two Boys,” was to create a musical portrait of the Internet, and his best ideas came in the scenes, largely choral ensembles, where he set out to realize this, notably the chorus when Brian first enters the chat room, singing the same brief repeated phrases (“Are u there? Are u there?”) over and over, in overlapping driving patterns. Spotlights penetrated the black mesh facades of [designer Michael] Yeargan’s sets, revealing people sitting alone at keyboards, while around them the projections whirled in geometric patterns offering images of connectedness and fragmentation, images evoking helixes and atomic models and the lights of night cities seen from space, all glowing and changing and presenting the enormity and fear and exhileration of the unknown.
But the idea didn’t develop significantly, musically or dramatically or visually, beyond the first chorus, apart from the addition of elements illustrating the treacherous terrain online: Brian stumbles across a gay sex scene, adding to his mounting sense of dread and titillation and uncertainty. I don’t think Muhly quite meant to signal “Internet bad!” in such broad terms, but for all of the inventiveness of his initial idea, the opera is oddly straitlaced and old-fashioned in its depiction of online life.
Robinson Myer has more on Muhly’s ability to represent the digital world:
Here is how Two Boys represents instant messaging: Brian sits at the right side of the stage, in his room, behind his computer, and the character he’s chatting with stands at the left. Towers loom behind both of them; on the towers are the simulacra of chat windows. The words he types, and the words his companion types, appear on the towers behind both of them simultaneously. … The effect is this: We see what Brian imagines. We see the words appear on his screen, the person he imagines typing them, and the screen he imagines, too.
[Mark] Grimmer and [Leo] Warner, the designers, very much intended this. “It’s very important that the seeming reality of the situation is shown physically onstage. Brian genuinely believes he’s having these interactions with these characters,” says Grimmer. “We wanted to keep reminding people that there is something really banal about the experience of having a conversation online. It’s about letters appearing on a screen, but yet from out of that, it’s as much about imagination as it is about anything else.”
The Dish 