MOSES IN SAN FRANCISCO

By Michael Walsh

SEVEN YEARS AGO, COMPOSER JOHN ADAMS, librettist Alice Goodman and director Peter Sellars rocked the opera world with Nixon in China. A number of provocative operas based on the lives of the still living or recently deceased followed, and now composer Stewart Wallace and librettist Michael Korie continue the trend with Harvey Milk, currently in its maiden run at the Houston Grand Opera. But where Nixon took someone who had become a cartoon devil and made him into a man, Harvey Milk takes a fairly ordinary man and makes him into a cartoon saint.

Milk was a gay politician in San Francisco who became a martyr of the homosexual-rights movement in 1978, when he was shot and killed by another city councilman. The opera divides his life into three parts: "The Closet," "The Castro" and "City Hall" represent his sexual coming-of-age as a gay Jewish boy in New York, his rise to local fame at the epicenter of San Francisco's outlandish and highly promiscuous gay neighborhood and, finally, his death at the hands of Dan White, a former cop and fireman who hated everything Milk stood for.

In Korie's treatment, Milk becomes a combination of Elie Wiesel, Oscar Wilde and Moses. He likens America's treatment of gays to the Holocaust and, in an embarrassing coda, leads his rambunctious flock to the gates of sexual and political freedom without quite being able to enter himself. The truth is somewhat different: Milk was an engaging if slightly goofy pol whose defining moment to most San Franciscans was his televised illustration of how to obey the pooper-scooper law. While the Milk legend may not be justified, Korie does use it to create a narrative that pulls the listener along.

Wallace has furnished eclectic, listener-friendly music (allusions to Puccini's Tosca, which Milk attended the night before his death, abound), but he lacks the skill in building ensembles that would have made the end of Act I (the 1969 Stonewall riot) or Act II (a high-camp, dikes-on-trikes gay and lesbian rally) really stirring. His most effective work-in what surely is an operatic first-comes in the tender love duet for Harvey and his boyfriend, Scott Smith, sung while they lie in bed together.

Director Christopher Alden stages the action briskly, resisting the temptation to demonize White. Robert Orth as Milk and Raymond Very as White are well-matched antagonists, vocally and dramatically, and Ward Holmquist conducts the score convincingly. The production will travel to New York City in April, to Germany in December and to San Francisco itself in November 1996. By that time, another one of these sorts of operas-Juice-will no doubt be premiering somewhere.