Lunar Follies

PTOLEMAEUS

The histrionic and lyric firmament — brilliantly spangled with tinsel stars — hangs above the rose-tinted photo-collage of scenes from the Cincinnati Opera Festival’s celebrated production of John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera. A letter from Jacques Offenbach, attesting to his fondness for Gay’s masterpiece, is quite beautifully yet simply framed in gentian eucalyptus, a wood known for its lustrous qualities and astonishing durability. Jenny Lind sang the wood’s praises in a lost aria from I Puritani, an unjustly neglected operetta by Anna Bolena, performed, for the first and only time, for Henry Ford, Ed Rafferty, and Grover Cleveland Alexander. Scenes from La Gioconda, digitally altered to include portrayals of Brünnhilde in unnatural congress with her stallion, Fritz, temper the dazzling (to some almost painfully so) light from the glowing firmament. Although some Christian Fundamentalist visitors are distressed, even appalled, by the activities of the Wagnerian heroine and her beloved charger, others — happily, the great majority — know that art’s function is to disturb, to question, to disgust, to bore, to nauseate, to make what General Tod Burlingame, Air Force, Retired, called “the big green.” The classic American diner booth, ca. 1949, that asserts its vinyl presence within a shallow alcove at a sudden turning of the wall, is flooded with a penetratingly vulgar orange light, and invites a bittersweet nostalgia in its contrast with the shifting of the erotic tableaux of the La Gioconda display. The whole diner “thing” permits one to recall a purer, more innocent era: of Stalingrad, Iwo Jima, Monte Cassino, Tarawa, Dresden, Hiroshima, and, of course, Auschwitz—“the good old days,” as they are wistfully called. The refreshments — cheeseburgers, French fries, bow ties, Mae Wests, and weak coffee — that crowd the formica-topped table of the diner booth are marvelously crafted of high-impact plastic, and look quite real. At precisely eighteen minutes past the hour, every hour, the pop hit made famous by Andy Warhol and his “gang,” “Bobino Josephine,” in the Boston Pops-Carly Simon version, is piped into the room, an aural complement to the “spectacle” of late-night variety show outtakes. Media critics, as well as their highbrow art-critic cousins, characterize the whole presentation as a profound example of “people’s art.”