Some time in the arts

On Monday evening I watched PBS for Great Performances doing the Metropolitan Opera production of Doctor Atomic by John Adams. His previous two operas were on historical figures or incidents -- Nixon in China and The Death of Klinghoffer -- and this one is too. It's about the final preparations for the first atom bomb test by Robert Oppenheimer. Even though in an interview Adams says this is the first time declassified government documents have been set to music the opera is more about the doubts Oppenheimer and the rest have about the morality of what they were doing. That makes for good opera. Alas, the thoughts of his wife is a lot more obscure and made for a slow spot. Then there was the Native American shaman (I think that's what she was supposed to be) who didn't seem to fit at all. I don't know if or when it will be on TV again. I caught it almost by accident when I plugged in my TV for an episode of In The Life and caught an ad for the broadcast. However, the opera will be broadcast on the radio from The Met on Saturday, Jan. 17. I was able to tape a program (also Sunday night) about how the opera was put together. Something for me to watch this evening waiting for the ball to drop. Here's an interview (about 8 minutes long) with John Adams about the opera when it was premiered in San Francisco in 2005. And here is The Met's own page about the opera.

This afternoon I went to see the movie Frost/Nixon, about the interviews David Frost did with Richard Nixon in 1977. There wasn't all that much of the actual interviews (which, I think, spanned about 6 hours), but all the work that went on in getting the interviews to happen and the cat-and-mouse games in trying to get Nixon to confess Watergate crimes. That's especially interesting because in the early interviews it appears that Frost is badly overmatched. Nixon sees these interviews as a chance to rehabilitate his image in preparation for a comeback. Very well done and highly recommended.