Doctor Atomic

You can enjoy high anxiety in the comfort of your neighborhood theater

Comments (0) By Lee Williams Thursday, Nov 6 2008

Think these are nerve-wracking times? It might help to remember that this high anxiety moment in history is just one more link in a long chain of such moments. There’s no better reminder of this nail--biting fact than John Adams’s mesmerizing contemporary opera Doctor Atomic. The story follows J. Robert Oppenheimer, “the father of the atomic bomb,” and his wife through the summer of 1945, the year the bomb was tested.

More About

Adams’s score is haunting and darkly gorgeous, and Peter Sellars’s libretto is a wondrous collage of poetry from John Donne and Baudelaire and language from declassified U.S. government documents. But the best part of this Houston event is that it’s all coming live, in high definition, from the Metropolitan Opera in New York onto large movie screens throughout the city. Get the best seat in the opera house for a fraction of the cost today at noon. Various locations. For information, visit www.metoperafamily.org. $16 to $24.
Sat., Nov. 8, noon, 2008