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