OPERA REVIEW : L.B. Opera Premiere at the Backlot

The Backlot in West Hollywood isn’t exactly a theater. It certainly isn’t an opera house.

It is a big, dark room adjacent to a high-tech disco and a restaurant that borrows its name from a Tennessee Williams play. Serving most of the time as a nightclubby cabaret, it presumably is a place where a few people--200 at most--can sip a drink, chat and make merry while some sort of show holds forth on a tiny stage in the corner.

The Backlot wasn’t always that frivolous. Back in the 1940s, it served as a bombsight factory. It wasn’t exactly fun-filled on Friday either, when the ever-enterprising and possibly foolhardy Long Beach Opera came to North Robertson Boulevard with the West Coast premiere of “The White Rose.”

Udo Zimmermann’s neo-Expressionist opera--if it can be called an opera at all--is bleak. In fact, it is unrelenting in its bleakness.

In 16 splendidly crafted, interconnected songs, it recounts the final agonies of Sophie and Hans Scholl, Munich university students who were executed by the Nazis for Resistance efforts in 1943. Their crime had been pamphleteering.

Zimmermann, an East German now in his mid-40s, focuses exclusively on the martyrs’ emotional and mental states during their final hours. Using simple poetic texts with agitprop punctuation by Wolfgang Willascheck and confining the playing time to less than 70 minutes, the composer deals essentially in artful compression.

There is no exposition here, and little action. One has to know some history to grasp why these heroes are incarcerated.

There is no external conflict. There are no dramatic explorations, no visible or audible conflicts, no denouements. Forget about catharsis.

“The White Rose,” which takes its title from the Resistance movement to which the Scholls belonged, is simply a series of neat inner monologues. The subject, inhumanity, is unspeakably momentous. The tone is appropriately intimate.

The performing space, unfortunately, creates a perception problem. The ambiance at the Backlot is stubbornly cheerful in an oddly glitzy way. The actors, lined up on a narrow platform against a wall, are too close for comfort--which is fine--and too close for tragic illusion--which isn’t.

The chamber orchestra, an ensemble of 14 virtuosos sensitively led by Michael Zearott, is stationed behind the audience at the rear of the room. Cohesion and concentration suffer accordingly.

Under the circumstances, one admires the profound seriousness and obvious dedication of all concerned. One listens carefully to the cries of desperation and the sobs of misery. One watches respectfully as the theatrical dilemmas are reconciled with imagination and resourcefulness. One is discomforted, and relieved when it is over.

For some reason, however, one is not moved. One wants to be, but one isn’t.

Not all of the blame can be attributed to the surroundings. Much of it must rest with the composer.

Zimmermann is not a daring innovator. He may not even be a deep thinker. He has chosen a daring, still all-too-viable subject, and treated it to a series of interesting, instantly accessible intellectual exercises.

The protagonists sing delicate Lieder notable for dissonant harmonic digressions and jagged, high-arching contours. The orchestra frames the set pieces with wry and bitter commentary.

Some of the vocal reflections suggest a strange, unearthly calm. A few bog down in post-Mahlerian cliche. The gestures of agitation, essentially bitter rather than defiant, are usually relegated to the orchestra. When the subject becomes too excruciating for ordinary lyricism, communication reverts to speech.

Somehow, it all seems a bit too pat, a bit too easy. The message is shattering, but the medium teeters toward evasive banality.

The Long Beach production is a replica of the celebrated version staged by Peter Reichenbach in Zurich nine months after the Hamburg premiere in 1986. It is an appreciatively grim example of modern musical theater with a classic German accent.

The stylized set, adapted from Knut Hetzer’s original design and evocatively lit by Heather Carson, consists of a white space lined with 10 chairs. Sophie Scholl, flanked by four mimes in identical gray costumes, inhabits one side. Her brother and his four alter egos sit on the other.

The mimes, an invention of Reichenbach, sometimes mirror the protagonists’ feelings. Sometimes they serve as a silent Greek chorus. Occasionally--as, for instance, when they usurp a few spoken lines--they distort the dramatic focus they want to reinforce.

The chief burden of the performance, a most strenuous burden in spite of its brevity, lies with Catherine Schwartzman as Sophie and Peter McLaughlin as Hans. She exudes innocence and benumbed sadness with a knowing economy of expression, and sustains the ascending vocal lines with shimmering purity. He performs with earnest sympathy, even though his emotional appeal tends toward the superficial and his baritone is strained by music better suited to a tenor.

Both articulate the uncredited English translation with clarity and point.

Performances are scheduled to continue through Nov. 20.