When I exited LoftOpera’s production of Rossini’s Otello last March, I asked a young woman what she thought of the performance. “It’s the bomb!” she said. I’ve heard this term, and its related “It’s da bomb!” and understood it to be an expression of great enthusiasm. It seems to date back to the mid-1990s. I have heard younger opera singers I teach say that someone’s audition aria was “the bomb.”
Well into the 1970s and even later, a performance that was a “bomb” was a massive failure. To bomb, in the theatrical sense, was to receive overwhelmingly negative reviews that killed ticket sales and forced a show to close on Saturday night (back in the time before Sunday matinees concluded an eight-performance week).
Joseph Heller, author of the classic anti-war tragicomic novel Catch-22, wrote a play in 1967 called We Bombed in New Haven, referring to the Connecticut city where shows had pre-Broadway tryouts. The play was not about theatrical touring but a provocative if unwieldy exploration of anti-military ideas at a time when the Vietnam War was in full force and the U.S. was deeply divided over its value.
Clive Barnes, theater critic for The New York Times, wanted to like Heller’s play in its 1968 Broadway premiere, but could not bring himself to call it either a bomb or, as might be opined nowadays, the bomb. In fact, the play had 10 previews and 85 performances, not exactly a hit for a work by a world-famous writer that starred Jason Robards and Diana Sands.
In Joe Allen, the popular restaurant in New York’s Theater District frequented by actors, tech people, producers and Broadway fans, there is the so-called Bomb Wall adorned exclusively with posters from shows that were huge flops, often with big stars such as Bette Davis, Mary Tyler Moore and Teresa Stratas.
I straddle the generations in which the meaning of being “a bomb” went from negative to positive. In a way it is akin to those horrible discriminatory words used against oppressed minorities that were meant to cause humiliation. The modern descendants of some of these groups have co-opted these bad words and claimed to own them, using them proudly or recklessly. I think that anyone who uses language as it should be used must know the history of the usage of a word before deploying it in writing or conversation.
So I would hesitate before calling an opera performance a bomb or the bomb.
Of course, something special can be “the bomb” but, nowadays, there is THE BOMB that is a huge factor in world affairs and it has been in the news. On the Fourth of July, North Korea conducted its latest and most successful missile test. Later in the week, world leaders from 20 large nations met for a two-day summit in Hamburg in which, inevitably, nuclear weaponry was discussed.
Less noticed was that, on July 7, 122 of the 192 members of the United Nations completed — after seven decades — and approved a treaty that would destroy all nuclear weaponry.
It is doubtful that North Korea will sign such an agreement. Only one NATO nation, the Netherlands, took part in the negotiations and was the sole vote against it. The United States, France and the United Kingdom issued a joint statement that they would not sign the accord.
In a world beset with fear and uncertainty, we turn to artistic expression for comprehension or just plain relief. Many people choose satire such as "Saturday Night Live." It should not surprise you that when people ask me how I grapple with daunting world affairs, I respond that I find insight and more complex understanding in operas. This art form, for those of us who love it, is a bottomless fount of exploration of the human condition.
The most famous end-of-world parable (but with hope held out for renewal and a better tomorrow) is in Götterdämmerung, the concluding opera of Wagner’s Ring Cycle.
There is another marvelous opera, Doctor Atomic, with music by John Adams and libretto by Peter Sellars, that eloquently explores the 1945 development of the atomic bomb at Los Alamos, New Mexico in what was known as the Manhattan Project. It premiered at San Francisco Opera in 2005 and has had important productions since, including one at the Metropolitan Opera in 2008 that marked the debuts of conductor Alan Gilbert in an excellent cast led by the outstanding performance by Gerald Finley as J. Robert Oppenheimer.
Santa Fe Opera just announced the company premiere of Doctor Atomic in 2018. Its proximity to the actual setting of where the bomb was created should provide an extra frisson (or should I say fission?) for those in attendance. I encourage you to get to Santa Fe next year if you are able.
The classic film, Dr. Strangelove, or: How I Learned to Stopped Worrying and Love the Bomb, Stanley Kubrick’s all-too-real satire from 1964, unsettled a nation that had recently been through the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis and the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy. The movie made audiences think about this topic back when fewer nations had access to atomic bombs.
I think Dr. Strangelove would make a fantastic opera today in the hands of the right composer, librettist and designers. The wicked and sardonic humor, tinged with doomsday foreboding, would strike a huge and edgy chord in our day and time. The technological possibilities of lighting and projections in opera would enhance the narrative unless (and this is a big unless) the technology is allowed to overwhelm the words and, especially, the music which is the core element of storytelling in opera.
Just imagine this scene as opera:
