trying to decide whether that is chiefly thanks to Mark Anthony Turnage's music, Richard Thomas's words, the roller-coaster staging by Richard Jones, the relishful performances from every singer on level or the verve of Tony Pappano and the orchestra and band, you realize that it's the unit stretch of them together, forming the perfect team. I'd care to know, though, if Richard Jones has a thing about smiley faces. Smileys grace the support of the drained, "low wages" blues-number WalMart employees; Smileys too, incongruous likewise, back in his Macbeth at Glyndebourne. Signature image? A few issues to research at slightly greater length here. The opera moves from animation to end in the most intuitive way: the low half is all brilliance, colour, images of fairy-tale scale - Anna's big plastic-golden throne from which she narrates the 1st region of her story into the willing microphones, and the pole dancers gleam like Rhinemaidens out of a bronzy, hazy tank. The libretto bounced and twirled, not taking itself too seriously, super-ironic and much very funny. Stern the Lawyer - Gerald Finlay in max-evil mode - puts in an appearance in Act 1 and the chorus flings insults at him. Beelzebub! Shiva the Destroyer of Worlds! Worst of all: Not Cool! Then he comes back and they do more of it. He rounds on them: "Anything else?" "Yoko Ono!" they cry. And Anna reminds him: "Honey, you're not in the report yet!" By the interval I thought I'd got it: hooray! It would have been so easily for this opera to go out judgmental and salacious; instead it's a celebration of life. They're not saying "she sold her person for a boob job and so see what happened to her, yah boo sucks", they're saying: "milk life for its joys, because they're gone too fast - be extreme and know it because tomorrow we." Oh, but hang on - they aren't. The 2nd half grows increasingly chilly: the thronging, singing, bright-suited chorus is slowly replaced by black-clad silent dancers with film cameras for heads, slinking around like Harry Potter dementors that suck out the leave to live. The fairy-tale lighting becomes bleaker and starker. Anna's beloved son sings only after he's dead. Anna's mother, who is moral but extremely judgmental, has more and more to do. The chorus melts away. All that's left are those camera-dementors and some pretty harsh judgments. "Oh America, you dirty whore, I gave you everything and you wanted more," Anna sings, about to die. Yes, Anna Nicole is a vivid metaphor for the descent and fall of western excess, maybe capitalism itself. But we can see that. Would it have been better not to do us complete the mind with it? I hoped the report would speak, and sing, for itself and let us to draw our own conclusions. Thumping blame onto America in an opera for Covent Garden is just.too easy. Yes, Anna Nicole was American, but western civilization as a solid has willingly lapped up the world that destroyed her. A topic that sounds derived from Fanfare for the Green Man runs through the score; the mantle that covers the transition of ten days is loaded with images of hamburgers. "Supersize me!" the initially reluctant Anna says to the plastic surgeon who's about to make her back pain for life. Come on, we all bought into this. We can't just change the blame. I also wonder slightly around the reporting style of the storytelling. This is an opera about the cultivation of life under constant reflection and it is not least the media intrusion, milked so horribly, that helps to destroy Anna. So in that sense, the weight is in keeping with the thrust, so to speak. But if you are telling rather than inhabiting a story, the emotion tends to remain at one remove. The music itself is right enough to have a ball in the throat when Daniel utters his dirge of drugs and when Anna, taking a few leaves out of Dido and Aeneas's book, mourns him. It certainly doesn't provide you cold. Still, I wanted more set-up to the tragedy - more of the nearness of Anna and her son and why he took to drugs, for instance; some of the second act's drama is a little sketchy, given the horrors it portrays (Anna giving birth on pay-per-view is another step on the downward plunge). And I wanted to give the real essence of the humanity, to get inside the characters' heads and be the disaster with them as Verdi, for instance, would have; but this very post-modern take ultimately doesn't allow the recognition that would take it possible. As for Turnage, though - I guess this may be the opera he was natural to write. His style really crystallises in it: the base is atonal and broad of rough-edged textures and crunchy harmonies that you can actually get your teeth into, yet it's also melodic and nip done with jazz, blues and a bit of rock 'n' roll in the party scene (hints here of his alleged flirtation with Beyonce and 'Single Ladies' at last year's Proms). It's a personal representative and a very contemporary one, but it's always listenable, memorable, focused. He's always had a sound instinct for zeitgeist-trapping - remember Greek in the 1980s? - and hera that instinct comes of age. It's a story for our times - and only future experiences will state whether it'll become a classic, revivable in ten, 20 or 50 years with more rewards to be gleaned on every hearing. Yesterday was its world premiere, remember. Oh, and yes, it was accompanied by a lot of so-called celebs - the station was brimming with people I thinking I recognised only wasn't sure whether or not I did. Seems that Boy George was there, and Norman Lamont - and only about every critic on earth. One final observation. Two major premieres are happening this nearly-spring. The Royal Opera gets Anna Nicole. The Imperial Ballet gets. Alice in Wonderland. Same planet, same theatre, different worlds...
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