[Me, I blame the choreographer for insufficient piety in the Bacchanalia...
or Borodina's Philistine attitude...]

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/09/12/DDG0S3FM1.DTL

 Steven Winn/The Culture: 'Samson and Delilah' and religion
 SF Chronicle, Sept. 12

 When the third-act curtain went up on "Samson and Delilah" on
 opening night, someone in the row behind me at the War Memorial
 Opera House giggled. It was hard to blame her; I was smiling a
 little myself. The image onstage at that moment, of the bedraggled
 hero (Clifton Forbis as Samson) pushing a fantastically huge
 millstone around in a circle, teetered on the edge of a ludicrous
 sight gag. Even a slightly bigger stone might have tipped the
 moment into full, unintended parody.

 Regardless of the arguable merits of Saint-Saens' biblical epic,
 the audience, it seemed, couldn't have cared less. The applause
 ran the gamut from tepid to perfunctory, with a light sprinkling
 of "Bravos" tossed in, and nearly died out entirely during the
 curtain calls. The principals wound up shuffling off the stage
 in silence as the opening-night attendees turned their backs and
 headed for the exits.

 There are any number of perfectly plausible reasons why "Samson"
 might not have registered as a palpable hit on the gala first
 night of the company's 85th season, but I couldn't help wondering
 if religion might have had just a little something to do with
 it. At a time when religion is an especially contentious issue
 in the culture, an Old Testament story about rival sects that
 persecute, kill and imprison each other, with the destruction
 of an enormous temple at the climax, might not be an obvious
 crowd-pleaser. Even before the first downbeat, "Samson and
 Delilah" faced an uphill battle. Set in 1150 B.C., the opera may
 seem disagreeably current to many operagoers. ...

Janos Gereben
www.sfcv.org
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