High camp. A future classic in the making, along with "Planet 9..", "Ben", and "Godzilla"

Or maybe Tootsie's roommate's opus, "Return to Love Canal"

I'll reserve judgment.  After all, who thought an opera about Nixon in China, or Robert Oppenheimer would be good?  Yet, they are, so there may be hope for this yet.

Where have you guys been?  This is nothing new in contemporary opera.  Witness "Nixon in China" and "The Death of Klinghoffer."  

Yes, it's utter crap, but its opera's problem, not environmentalism's.  

I really don't know what the librettists' problem is.  Novelists still find their way toward melodrama.  I mean, seriously, isn't there enough incest, murder, and disollution in contemporary life and fiction to fuel a new opera?  As far as I can see, it's pure attention-seeking.  The producers know that if they do "Inconvenient Truth" everyone will take a look, if only to scoff.  

Was Nixon" or "klinghoffer" based on an Excel file? Oops, I mean a Word doc? No wait, a PowerPoint preso?

Well, teppy, "Nixon" might as well have been written about a computer file.  

I'm not all down on minimalist composers like Phillip Glass and Steve Reich--I have several of Reich's works on my hard drive--but when they move into opera or symphonies I think they're pushing the form into directions it just can't support.  What's arresting and even enlightening about minimalist music isn't any more so for having been expanded from a couple of marimbas to an entire orchestra.  The orchestra--or the opera company--only serves to make this superficially simple music seem ridiculous.

So, I guess what I'm saying is that if you were going to ask Phillip Glass or a composer like him to score an opera, it'd almost make more sense for him to do "Inconvenient Truth" than anything along the lines of "Carmen" or the Ring Cycle.   Of course, this is just another way of saying that Phillip Glass and those like him should probably steer clear of opera.

"But it is of no consequence to me which came first, the carbon dioxide or the temperature. "

Roflz

aero - how are the acoustics in the Sydney Opera House or whatever the clamshell thing is called?

tep, I've never been inside.  Only been to Syd twice--I live in Melbourne.  

There was a New Yorker piece a year or two back about the Opera House and its architect.  I seem to recall that the aucoustics are terrible, but thought to be because the interior was a compromise design when the project went overbudget.  I also seem to recall that there has been a recent move to reinvent the interior with improved acoustics.

Ugh.  I knew things were headed downhill after Jerry Springer: The Opera.  

I'm going on record as being extremely pessimistic about this.

I'm not familiar with that one, cspencef, but having listened to an in-depth profile of Jerry Springer on This American Life, I gotta tell ya, there's definitely something operatic about that man's life story.  A bunch of his old friends from his days in Cincinnati politics view The Jerry Springer show as a tragic fall in the literary sense.  Springer was a total Kennedy liberal, a kind of practical idealist and on a local level was extremely successful, winning the Cinci mayoralty by the biggest margin ever.

Other fun fact: Springer floated the possibility of a Senate run in Ohio back in 2002 or 2004, I can't remember which.  He went on a barnstorming speaking tour of county-level Democratic Party functions all over the state, and according to everyone interviewed, he completely wowed them with his unapologetic economic liberal policy talk as well as is Ellis-Island-immigrant-style patriotism--the child of Holocaust survivors, he was born in Germany in 1946 and entered the US by ship in '49.   He also ran a bunch of focus groups to try and figure out how much the show would hamper him.  The result was not much--so long as he quit it.  In the end, though, he couldn't get out of his tv contract.

That might have been a substantial opera, aero, but the actual opera (as Dave Barry would say, I am not making this up) is more or less an operatic rendering of a typical over-the-top episode of the show.  It originated at the Edinburgh festival, can't remember what year, but it actually came to Carnegie Hall this past January (see jerryspringertheopera.com) with Harvey Keitel in the (non-singing) title role; all the emotional focus is on the show guests, including a grown woman in a diaper (I think).  It's a little bit musical-ish, not surprisingly, but still, it's out there.  It can be followed through any number of archive article in the NYTimes.

If this Inconvenient Opera is a La Scala project I presume it won't be the unabashedly trashy thing the Jerry Springer opera was, but I'm still going to stick with my declared pessimism.