As the first full performance of "No for an Answer" came to an end
last night, it became clear that Marc Blitzstein - speaking to us from
a distance of six decades - will not deal with the issue of anthrax.
Otherwise, this San Francisco world premiere reconstruction sounded very
much as if the late composer set the day's New York Times to music.

Real and imagined dangers threaten the nation.  The state acts to protect
itself.  To make that possible, civil liberties must be curtailed.  Public
reaction - especially by immigrants from repressive regimes who struggled
through hell to come to America to be part of a free society - ranges from
confusion, to apprehension, to frustration and anger.

And so the opera's characters sing about being in love with the idea of
liberty, their determination to remain free.  And, in the event, to defeat
the repressive capitalist regime.  All this - clearly a forerunner of
John Adams' political operas - in a musical idiom encompassing a jazzy,
Broadway-like tone as well as a very American equivalent of Soviet heroic
music, and something else whose echoes will have been heard in Leonard
Bernstein, Kurt Weill, Stephen Sondheim.  It's passing strange.

On the very day President Bush signed the anti-terrorist "USA Act" into
law, "No for an Answer" - completed in 1941, but before the Nazi invasion
of the Soviet Union and the attack on Pearl Harbor - spoke with the
immediacy and weight of contemporary headlines.

A few weeks ago, the premiere would have been a quaint curiosity piece for
Lefties still left behind.  Today, its topics of unemployment, insecurity,
fear, the need for community, the wish to make sense of the world, to
organize, to act - they all have a resonance unimaginable before Sept.
11 or even before the economic downturn that began only in last year.

Blitzstein's major theme in the 'Thirties, besides social-economic justice,
was state repression.  The story of "No for an Answer" culminates in
illegal police action based on work by informants, causing the death of
a man and a devastating fire which destroys the workers' club.  It's a
long way from Oct.  26, 2001, but the audience was acutely aware of the
coincidence - and voiced it in the after-performance discussion.

The new law, after all, gives the government a freer hand to conduct
searches, detain or deport suspects, eavesdrop on communication, monitor
financial transactions and obtain electronic records of individuals,
reducing the need for subpoenas, court orders or other legal checks to
enable law enforcement to move more quickly.  Communist subversion then,
terrorist acts today - the danger in the response to either seems eerily,
disturbingly similar.

But that's just one aspect of the many unusual, fascinating, significant
things ABOUT this long-delayed production of Blitzstein's opera.
Before listing some more notable footnotes, one must report, with
great reluctance, that the work itself is short on musical and dramatic
values.  Its wild range of Yiddish theater, Greek and Polish folksongs,
sprechtstimme, early Minimalism, vaudeville, music hall, and much, much
more somehow all narrow down to a monotonous sound, a sameness that's
incongruous, but undeniable, in face of the variety of its sources.

The book - reconstructed from an incomplete manuscript, with periodic
rescue efforts by everybody from Leonard Bernstein to Lillian Hellman to
Michael Tilson Thomas - is a mess.  The lyrics vary from acceptable to not.

So given all this, what's special about this (re-)birth of "No for an
Answer"? A wonderful production and the circumstances.  The disparity
between those two is a story in itself.  The work is produced by the
American Conservatory Theater's Master of Fine Arts Program, in A.C.T.'s
first venture into a new venue, the 200-seat Zeum Theater.

It is directed, with devotion and a sure touch, by company artistic
director Carey Perloff.  Although Blitzstein himself and the work's
advocates all call it an opera, the performance was assigned to a cast
of young actors, not singers, fittingly because in fact the work is far
more an American musical than the modern opera Blitzstein had in mind.
The production works, to the extent it can overcome the weakness of the
material, because Perloff's kids are so talented, dedicated and brave.
Against all odds, the outcome is a gripping presentation, with excellent
musical performances.

The project was born of Tilson Thomas' lifelong ambition to have the
opera produced in full.  As music director of the San Francisco Symphony,
he conducted excerpts from the work in a Davies Hall American Music
Festival five years ago.  Perloff said MTT was (and perhaps still is)
planning to orchestrate the work (the extremely difficult piano score
played brilliantly in this production by musical director Peter Maleitzke),
and that "he sat through rehearsals weeping because of what the work means
to him." (MTT's father, who had worked on the first production of "The
Cradle Will Rock," was Blitzstein's cousin.)

Also participating in the project:  Blitzstein biographer Eric A.
Gordon and Brad Rosenstein, program director for the SF Performing Arts
Library and Museum.  "No for an Answer" has had some abbreviated concert
performances over the years, some recorded, and songs from it have surfaced
occasionally - such as the "Dimple Song" in Carol Channing's charming
interpretation.  And yet, this was the first time not only for a complete
performance but for most of its music to be heard at all.

"No for an Answer" takes place in 1936 in Crest Lake, New York, a summer
resort town, whose hotel and restaurant workers are unemployed during the
rest of the year.  (Unlike in 2001, when unemployment in tourism may be the
case all year long.) The opera opens with a chorus rehearsal in a workers'
club, conducted by Cutch, a recent Russian immigrant (Melissa von Siegel)
who is called Toscanini by her long-suffering charges of amateur singers.

The diner, which provides the space for the club, is run by a Greek
immigrant, Nick (Adam Ludwig, in one of the production's strongest
performances), whose son is in jail as an "outside agitator" in the south.
When Joe (Jed Orlemann) is released from jail, he makes his way back to
New York, but under a different name and trying to avoid police - while
continuing his organizing activity.

Into the workers' club (with its colorful people vividly portrayed by Saba
Homayoon, T.  Edward Webster, and a dozen young actors) comes a rich couple
Paul and Clara (Ryan Farley and Julie Fitzpatrick) whose involvement with
the club becomes the lynchpin of the story.  Effecting performances by
Renee Penegor, Heidi Armbruster, Michael Chmiel, Finnerty Steeves, Jennifer
Charles, Sky Soleil, Michael Goncalves Davis, Jessica Diane Turner and Neil
Edward Hopkins help raise the work to as high a level as it can conceivably
go in any theater or opera house (lest the piece suffers the lamentable
fate of "operatic" presentation of a musical).  More importantly, this
unusual premiere in an unexpected setting signals a bright future for
A.C.T.

(In yet another instance of time falling away, look at those names in
the cast.  They represent the same rich ethnic/national mix Blitzstein's
characters presented so many years ago, in a world so different, and now
suddenly so familiar again.)

Janos Gereben/SF
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