Fancy people

Spotted, outside the Coliseum after the British premiere of Dr. Atomic: the stunningly androgynous Tilda Swinton, standing nearly six feet tall, in a short blonde haircut, buzzed at a sharp angle in the back and gelled into submission in the front. Wearing a well-tailored tuxedo suit with satin lapels and a plunging neckline, and very tall, fishnet-style shoe boots. She disappeared swiftly down a nearby alley, and we were left temporarily speechless.

The opera itself was good too, of course -- the production was entirely different than the one at the Lyric, less stark but also less full of awkward dance numbers. They solved the problem of getting a gigantic number of people on stage at the same time by building this massive framework of little rooms stacked on top of one another, basically a grid. Before the opera began, there was a huge periodic table of the elements projected on the scrim in front of the stage, with the radioactive elements missing. In the opening scene, this morphed into the grid full of singing scientists. At first the faces of the actual scientists were projected onto fabric in front of the grid, and then individual curtains opened to reveal the singers. Later, they all arrayed themselves in different postures, pressing their legs and arms against the walls so as to suspend themselves in different poses, and the collective effect -- you saw ten or fifteen different bodies across the whole grid -- was to give a sense of split-second frames of motion, like the pages of a flip book, or a Muybridge shot. In this production, when Oppenheimer, at the close of the first act, sings Donne's "Batter my heart, three-person'd God" -- the test site is called Trinity -- he faces away from the bomb and only turns to it at the end. "Reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend / But is captived, and proves weak or untrue," he recites, suddenly frightened at the power he is in possession of, needing, or seeming to need, to believe that there is something outside of himself that will check his actions.

The close of Dr. Atomic, which represents the explosion of the bomb followed by Japanese voices, is apocalyptic, but in the most aestheticized way. You're expecting the explosion throughout the entire opera, and though the extremely loud thrumming is terrifying, it's hardly surprising. As the volume builds, you watch the entire cast put on protective glasses and kneel down to watch the bomb, but they're facing you, and a bright light flashes that casts them into silhouette and illuminates the mountains behind them. The staging acknowledges the spectacle: they're watching you, you're watching them. Then voices, then the curtain.