Lawson Taitte

FORT WORTH – Fort Worth Opera opened its 2008 festival Friday with a superb performance of Tony Kushner's Angels in America – or at least the fragments of it that made it into Peter Eötvös' opera of the same name.

The question is, does the elaborate, demanding music really add anything to the Pulitzer Prize-winning script?

Mr. Eötvös, the Hungarian composer-conductor, has remained a high priest of high modernism despite the inroads minimalism and neo-romanticism have made in the world of opera. Much of this score (premiered in Paris in 2004 and receiving only its second American production here) connects directly with the Second Viennese School as filtered through the sensibilities of very late Stravinsky and early Boulez in the 1950s.

It's hard to tell whether the attrition of the Scott Theatre audience between first and second acts was due to the spiky music or the plot, with its Marxism, frank homosexuality and frequent four-letter words. Miraculously, the text was delivered with such clarity that most of the time you didn't need to read the supertitles to be shocked, if you were of a mind.

This composer who cast countertenors as Chekhov's Three Sisters chose to make most of these gay and occasionally cross-dressing New Yorkers deep-voiced baritones and basses. That decision casts a new light on the story: David Adam Moore's Prior Walter makes a sonorous, even regal, prophet in his later scenes, and his campy speeches early on are Mephistophelean rather than prissy.

The angel who visits Prior during his illness is a comparatively small role in the original two-part drama (and in the award-winning HBO miniseries made from it). As Mari Mezei has trimmed the plays down for the operatic libretto, the role looms much larger. Ava Pine flies in and out on wires like some celestial Peter Pan, trilling and vocalizing in shimmering cascades of coloratura. If most of the other parts often recall Berg, the Angel sounds more like advanced Richard Strauss.

The entire cast – eight singers who share all the roles plus a choral trio – turns out splendid performances. Director David Gately has coaxed them into making this an engaging evening of theater, whatever you decide about the music.

Conductor Christopher Larkin held the kaleidoscopic score together, too. Certainly Mr. Eötvös' instrumental invention produces many delights, like the phantom phone callers Kelly Anderson as Roy Cohn keeps putting on hold. There's no doubt that the composition succeeds at least as incidental music.

That it succeeds as sung drama, I am less sure. The strange harmonies provided by the offstage trio add atmosphere. But I seldom heard a vocal line that amplified the meaning of the text or the feelings of a character appreciably.

Perhaps that impression would change on further hearings. The great thing about the Fort Worth production is that it entices you to try again.

PLAN YOUR LIFE Through June 7 at the Scott Theatre, Fort Worth Community Arts Center, Fort Worth. Runs 160 mins. $17 to $52. 817-731-0726, www.fwopera.org.

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