Nixon in China, San Francisco Opera, June 17 2012

As promised earlier, today it was back to the War Memorial Opera House for my third Nixon in China, having already seen the dress rehearsal and a performance that I traded my wife’s ticket for. The staging was of course the same, there were no substitutions in the cast, and the performance went just like the previous one.

I did notice two things that I hadn’t before: in the first act, Chairman Mao gets to demonstrate his heldentenor voice with a note held for a loooooooong time. The word? Duraaaaaaaaation. Some sort of pun, perhaps? And I found another sentence to add to my collection of insipid lines from opera in English. To “Who was that on the telephone?” (Angle of Repose) and “I’ll have to give you a geography lesson,” (Heart of a Soldier), I can add “Where’s the toilet?” sung by Henry Kissinger in act 3. After Chou En-lai tells him “Through the door,” Kissinger replies “Excuse me, I’ll be back in a moment,” and that’s the last we hear from him. He does return (he can be seen zipping up his trousers) and wanders around and winds up standing underneath his photo, but we don’t hear him again. The librettist must have had some sort of bone to pick with Kissinger, because his character is treated quite shabbily.

So, after trying to do my due diligence with three performances, I’m still left wondering what all the fuss is about. It will probably be a long time before I feel obliged to see this opera again, which is just fine. It’s still a gamma.