Last Thursday night I attended the Washington Opera's performance of
Carlisle Floyd's *Of Mice and Men* at the Kennedy Center.

It was an interesting experience, worth the half-price I paid for my
senior citizen's orchestra seat.  I'd probably have regretted the full,
three-figure, price however.

I thought the music was fine...if by music your exclude the solo singing.
Superimposed upon what I thought was a gripping tale set to fascinating
orchestral music were these lines of stage dialogue (Sprechstimme, maybe?)
that were neither natural sounding speech (which I think I would have
preferred) nor so far as I could make out, musical.  Time and again on
hearing what are the banalities of ordinary conversation translated into
what are supposed to be operatic terms I kept asking myself, "Are these
intonations necessary?"

This said, I must report that Michael Hendrick, who sang the role of Lenny
won a thunderous ovation from an audience which, while it did not fill the
theater, was reassuringly large.  Since it didn't seem to me that he was
singing so much as declaiming his lines while jumping and gesturing and
generally playing the grown man w/ the mind of an eight-year old, I could
only join the applause out of courtesy.  I admired much more the "singing"
Diane Alexander who had the role of Curley's wife, an equally thankless
role so far as I could make out as to musical quality, but she seemed
clearly to have a voice worth hearing out in roles such as Susannah or
Donna Anna, which she has also sung.

I not only liked the orchestral music when the solo singers (as opposed to
the few choruses, see the Washington Post review, below) didn't get in the
way but also the sets, especially the scrims.  One, seen at the beginning
and the end, is a two-lane highway, the lanes separated by a broken white
line perpendicularly bisecting the scrim, w/ the highways edges starting
at the two lower corners and meeting at the lane divider at the top of the
screen.  There's nothing else.  The other scrim is a bronze sky from top
almost all the way to the bottom, where one sees a strip of land on which
in total isolation there is a farm house, barely denting the horizon, a
barn, and what is probably the bunkhouse, in which some of the story's
crucial action occurs.

The Washington Post review, which.  until it becomes archives can be seen
free of charge at:

   http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A31331-2001Oct21.html

My only real disagreement w/ it is that the shooting of Lenny by his friend
at the end moved me neither to laughter nor to tears.  It only reminded me
of the shooting, off stage, of Candy's beloved bunkhouse old dog because it
was stinking up the bunkhouse and a nuisance to everyone else.

Walter Meyer