MAXIMUM MINIMALISM

By Michael Walsh

Collaboration is the lifeblood of the musical theater: Mozart and Da Ponte, Verdi and Boito, Strauss and Hofmannsthal. But posthumous collaboration has had to wait until the advent of the phonograph, motion pictures and the camcorder. Today the late George Gershwin can play Rhapsody in Blue with Michael Tilson Thomas, Natalie Cole can sing a duet with her deceased dad Nat King Cole--and composer Philip Glass can write a trilogy of operas with the French author, aesthete and movie director Jean Cocteau, dead since 1963.

This unlikely partnership between the modern American minimalist and the chain-smoking Gallic dandy has resulted in 1993's Orphee, 1994's La Belle et la Bete and now Les Enfants Terribles, each based on a film of the same name by Cocteau. Distinguished not only by Glass's familiar, artful brand of minimalist music but also by Cocteau's impish, erotic sensibility, the operas are nevertheless quite different from one another. Orphee was a conventional opera that followed the script of the original film. With La Belle, Glass went a step further, stripping the film of its sound track and composing a live but carefully synchronized operatic accompaniment that quickly took its place among his finest and most viscerally exciting works.

By contrast, Les Enfants Terribles (subtitled Children of the Game)--which premiered last spring at the Spoleto Festival USA in Charleston, South Carolina, and was staged last month at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in New York City--uses the medium of dance to make its point. Cocteau's 1929 novel, which he transformed into a 1950 movie, was a typically neurasthenic tale of the unhealthy relationship of Paul and Lise, siblings whose excessive attachment to each other eventually destroys them. At once precious and oblique, the story could easily seem ridiculous today.

Glass and his other collaborator, choreographer Susan Marshall, get around this difficulty by telling the story largely through music and movement, not singing. Paul and Lise are represented on stage not only by singers (Philip Cutlip and Christine Arand in both productions) but also by three dancers, enabling Glass and Marshall to illustrate various aspects of their personalities simultaneously. Indeed, Marshall's fluid, shifting, molting steps stand in marked contrast to Glass's crystalline music, scored for three electronic keyboards and recalling the textures, if not the melodies, of Igor Stravinsky's Les Noces. The collaborators--Cocteau obviously excepted--call their work a dance-opera spectacle. But Les Enfants Terribles is neither grandiose nor grand, merely the work of three artists, whether quick or dead, at the top of their form.

--By Michael Walsh