If you suspect anachronism here, just apply Gertrud Stein's arithmetic.
At any rate, it is clear that Purcell's 1689 "Dido and Aeneas" and Virgil
Thomson's 1934 "Four Saints in Three Acts" were both written for Mark
Morris.

At yesterday's U.S. premiere in Berkeley's Zellerbach Hall, "Saints" came
across as Morris' own, just a clearly and delightfully as did "Dido," first
seen here five years ago.

What an operatic doubleheader!  Yes, *opera* because Morris' choreography
overlays the original works, presented with soloists, chorus and orchestra.
The bad boy/true genius of dance somehow managed to enhance, transform, and
preserve the two operas at the same time.

Dancing Dido himself perhaps for the last time (I hear things), Morris
got away -- brilliantly -- with making this tragic work both delightfully
funny and deeply moving.  His unique and quirky dance vocabulary brought
out aspects of the magnificent Purcell score that you may never hear in a
"normal" performance.  The Morris "Dido" has been discussed extensively in
these parts -- "Saints" was the novelty, the focus of the evening, in its
second production only since the English National Opera premiere in June.

Here was the dilemma:  what would Mr.  Quirky do with Thomson's quirky
music, written for Stein's quirkiest of libretti? Instead of turning the
evening into a ridiculous piece of excess, however, Morris infused the work
with a lighthearted, but lyrical and warm sense of honest effort "to make
sense" out of deliberate nonsense.

Stein's libretto is an experiment on the order of a "composition"
consisting of silence.  "Generally speaking," she said in commenting on
the work, "anybody is more interesting doing nothing than doing something."
It's no use arguing with that premise:  "Saints" is what it is -- numbers,
numbers, numbers, endless repetition of words and phrases, pigeons on the
grass, alas, magpies in the sky, "they might be very well very well very
well they might be very well very well..." and so on.

Add to that Thomson's hoedown/country dance/four musical themes per hour
music, with some melting, gorgeous fragments at the end, and material for
Andrew Lloyd Webber to steal for cat recitatives.

And out of all this stuff and nonsense, quirkiness ne ultra, Morris
created an eminently sensible, sensitive, startling, entertaining,
somewhat humorous, but more importantly often beautiful work.

I knew better than a woman sitting nearby, desperately trying to read the
libretto in the dark; I gave up early on the idea of relating text, music
and dance to the "original," admittedly not always -- not most of the time,
in fact -- knowing what's happening.  And yet, almost always, I "got" the
point in this "pointless" series of non-events.

The down-to-earth corps (of the all-soloist Morris troupe) show many
individual expressions, but the dancers move together, providing a base,
a background, a counterpoint to the two sensational soloists.  Michelle
Yard is St. Teresa, a vital, sturdy, kind and naive force, and rather
unsaintly in an almost completely transparent white baby doll.  John
Heginbotham is a pure vision of St. Ignatius, a remarkable dancer with a
most expressive face.  Except for one wonderful scene when the two act as
none-too-efficient guards at heaven's gate, their interaction is completely
up to the viewer's interpretation.  Ambiguity is the name of the game for
the Messrs.  Thomson and Morris, led by Ms. Stein.

I don't know how Cal Performances director Robert W. Cole manages, but
unlike the deadly recorded music for much larger dance companies, Morris'
blissfully numerous productions here always get "real" music and very good
performances at that.  Craig Smith conducted members of the Berkeley
Symphony and the excellent American Bach Soloists chorus.  Jennifer Lane
was outstanding in singing both Dido and St. Teresa II.  Sopranos Jayne
West, Jennifer Ellis; mezzo Elspeth Franks; tenor Scott Whitaker; and
baritones William Sharp and Hugh Davies sang solo roles in both operas.

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Janos Gereben/San Fran