A large black casket levitates over white steam on Geary Theater's empty
stage, and when it settles, who but Marianne Faithfull would emerge from
it, in the flame-red attire of the devil.

She is followed by Jack Willis, Monika Tahal, Gabriella Santinelli,
Niger Richards (who will be Pegleg at performances when Faithfull is off),
Richard Strange, Sona Cervena, Jake Thornton, Janet Henfrey, Mary Margaret
O'Hara, Dan Robinson, and finally, Matt McGrath, the most appealingly
bizarre hero you'll see selling his soul in any opera house or theater
around.

Two and a half hours of nonstop theatrical-musical bliss later, at today's
matinee preview, they all disappeared into the same box, a dozen performers
swallowed up by a single-occupancy casket.

When the American premiere of Robert Wilson's "The Black Rider" begins
a month-long run on Sept.  1, Carey Perloff will have helped out the San
Francisco Opera in two significant ways.

Amazingly, even after his four decades of headline-making work around
the world, there has never been a Wilson production in the Bay Area.
Also, what was to be SFO's staged *premiere* in 2003 of Carl Maria von
Weber's 1821 "Der Freischutz" just didn't happen when the Opera ran out
of money.  (There was a Spring Opera production in 1964, and a concert
performance - Hollreiser; Lorengar, Swenson, Johns, Devlin - in 1985.)

Perloff to the rescue.  The artistic director of the American Conservatory
Theater has just completed a decade-long effort to bring to ACT Wilson's
phantasmagorical take on "Der Freischutz."

The production's San Francisco connection is quite a story.  Perloff
- who has since directed the SF Opera Center in Gluck's "Iphigenie
en Tauride," and worked with Michael Tilson Thomas to produce the
60-year-delayed premiere of Marc Blitzstein's "No for an Answer" -
arrived here in 1991, at age 32, to take over Bill Ball's shell-shocked
ACT.  (The company's main venue, the Geary Theater, was still in ruins
after the big earthquake 18 months before.)

In 1990, Wilson's "Black Rider" (its text, by William Burroughs, translated
into German), premiered in Hamburg.  In 1994, when visiting San Francisco
to receive an honorary arts degree, Wilson had dinner with Perloff, and
the two began planning what eventually led to next week's US premiere
here.

The English version's premiere took place this May in London; the
co-production with ACT and Sydney Festival will go from here to Australia,
with no other stops planned at this point.

That's really a shame because "Black Rider" is one of Wilson's most
compact and effective works.  It's a visual feast, a musical delight,
theater that transports the audience into a strange, unique world of its
own.

Throughout it all, there is integrity to the production, the fantastic
images serve a purpose, say something - they are not there to impress
or shock.  The long balletic scene at the heart of the work, depicting
the flight of the accursed bullet, breathes naturally, it is paced
perfectly, and becomes instantly memorable.

With Tom Waits' klezmer-tinged, passionate music (performed by
Bent Clausen's devilishly clever Magic Bullets band), in Wilson's
superb setting and hallucinogenic lighting, Frida Parmeggiani's
space-age/Renaissance costumes, "Black Rider" is entrusted to a great,
multi-national cast, and technical wizards who handle the complex
multimedia production expertly - even at a preview.

Janos Gereben
www.sfcv.org
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