February 2011: Articles about Anna Nicole
Articles about Anna Nicole
5 things you need to know about Anna Nicole-Smith: The Opera
If you’re the sort of person, that is, who loves TV extravaganzas based on the lives of tragic Playboy centerfolds
British television network the BBC will broadcast Anna Nicole, an opera based on the combustible life of busty Playboy model Anna Nicole Smith. Here are 5 key details about this mish-mash of tabloid tale and high art, set to air early next year:
1. It’s a real opera
The creators of Anna Nicole have impressive credentials: The Royal Opera House will be staging it, and award-winning composer Mark Antony Turnage has written the score. Dutch singer Eva-Maria Westbroek, “one of the world’s leading sopranos,” will be taking on the title role.
2. Its writer is no stranger to this peculiar sub-genre
Librettist Richard Thomas also authored Jerry Springer: The Opera, which was staged at Carnegie Hall in New York in January 2008 with Harvey Keitel in the lead role. When a televised version premiered on the BBC in 2005, Christian groups protested outside the corporation’s headquarters and attempted to sue executives for blasphemy.
3. It’s not quite a tell-all
The film will dramatize Smith’s career, her controversial marriage to nonagenarian billionaire J. Howard Marshall, and her untimely death from a drug overdose — but will shy away from documenting the ongoing legal battles surrounding her demise.
4. Which isn’t to say it will be sanitized
The Royal Opera House has warned that the show will include “extreme language, drug abuse and sexual content.” In other words, says Tim Adler at Deadline Hollywood, the BBC should “expect the viewer complaint hotline to be ringing off the hook” — which is, no doubt, the intention.
5. It’s only being shown in the U.K. (for now)
Anna Nicole will premiere at the Royal Opera House and be shown live on British TV in February 2011, but, at the moment anyway, there are plans to broadcast it in the U.S.
An aria of sex, drugs, gold-digging and tragedy
Holly Williams, The Independent on Sunday, 23 January 2011
What are we talking about?
The life and times of Anna Nicole Smith – Playboy model, reality TV star and octogenarian billionaire’s wife, who died of a drug overdose at 39 – are given the operatic treatment in a world premiere at the Royal Opera House next month.
Elevator pitch
Anna’s aria of sex, drugs and gold-digging.
Prime movers
Tony Hall, ROH’s chief exec, who asked composer Mark-Anthony Turnage to come up with a contemporary subject. Librettist Richard Thomas, who promises to bring his skill at tackling celebrity culture and pushing the boundaries of taste into play (he’s best known for Jerry Springer: The Opera). Richard Jones directs, while the ROH’s musical director Antonio Pappano conducts.
The Stars
Dutch soprano Eva-Maria Westbroek stars as Anna Nicole, while Alan Oke (who played Gandhi in Phillip Glass’s 2007 opera Satyagraha) takes on the role of the, ahem, love interest, “Old Man Marshal”.
The early buzz
Anna Nicole featured in many a 2011 look-ahead list, the “extreme language, drug abuse and sexual content” promised – sorry, warned of – in the promotional material proving irresistible. The writer Peter Conrad has suggested that while The Royal Opera is “expecting and counting on a fuss…no one should dispute Turnage’s choice of subject. The gaudily uninhibited Anna Nicole belongs in opera.” Feminist website Jezebel doesn’t agree: “From the creators of Jerry Springer: The Opera comes a similar treatment for Anna Nicole Smith. Except, unlike Springer, she’s dead. Which makes this all feel a little awkward.”
Insider knowledge
Director of opera at the ROH, Elaine Padmore, says it will be more parable than documentary; a “larger-than-life American story”. Think Puccini’s Girl of the Golden West, apparently.
It’s great that…
It will also be televised on BBC4
It’s a shame that…
We don’t know more about the precise plot details. The ROH is rumoured to be nervous about the possibility of legal action from those represented in the production who are still living.
Hit potential
Already selling well. May face accusations of cheap popularism, controversy courting, or cashing in on celebrity obsession – or may emerge as a biting comment on the topic. Oh, and the pole-dancing should help too.
The Times of India, 24 January 2011
An opera, based on the life of late model Anna Nicole Smith, could just be the most X-rated opera ever seen in the Royal Opera House, with its lurid sex scenes and foul language.
The storyline covers everything from the late model’s drug abuse to her relationship with J. Howard Marshall, the millionaire octogenarian that she married in 1994, just a year before his death.
Critics are already citing one scene as particularly shocking, in which the heroine performs oral sex on her wheelchair-bound boyfriend.
It has been composed and conceived by Mark-Anthony Turnage, and the man behind the lyrics is Richard Thomas, the librettist who also wrote 2003′s ‘Jerry Springer: The Opera’.
According to the Times Magazine, Thomas, 60, says that ‘Anna Nicole’ delivers the same kind of drama and comedy as the grand operas of the 19th century.
“A lot of people say: ‘Oh, but do you really think Anna Nicole deserves an opera?” the Daily Mail quoted him as saying.
“I say yes, she’s more deserving of an opera than any individual who has ever lived. That’s my line because I’m sick of that snobbery.
“Anna Nicole is grand opera, just like those of old with a mix of comedy and horror,” he stated.
The Royal Opera House is hoping that the subject matter and risque content will attract a younger audience, and has even lowered its prices with a maximum of 75 pounds to reflect that.
Highbrow opera fans can just about cope with the erotic scene in Richard Strauss’s Salome.
So the X-rated content in the Royal Opera House’s latest production is set to spark huge controversy.
A new opera, based on the life of Anna Nicole Smith, promises to divide opinion with lurid sex scenes and a script packed with foul language.
The storyline covers everything from the late model’s drug abuse to her relationship with J. Howard Marshall, the millionaire octogenarian that she married in 1994, just a year before his death.
Critics are already citing one scene as particularly shocking, in which the heroine performs oral sex on her wheelchair-bound boyfriend.
Composed and conceived by Mark-Anthony Turnage, it comes as little surprise that the man behind the lyrics is Richard Thomas, the librettist who also wrote 2003′s Jerry Springer: The Opera.
His last work sparked outcry from Christians over his portrayal of Jesus and, again, explicit language.
But Thomas, 60, says that Anna Nicole delivers the same kind of drama and comedy as the grand operas of the 19th century.
‘A lot of people say: “Oh, but do you really think Anna Nicole deserves an opera?”
‘I say yes, she’s more deserving of an opera than any individual who has ever lived. That’s my line because I’m sick of that snobbery,’ he told The Times Magazine.
‘Anna Nicole is grand opera, just like those of old with a mix of comedy and horror,’ he continued.
The Royal Opera House is hoping that the subject matter and risqué content will attract a younger audience, and has even lowered its prices with a maximum of £75 to reflect that.
Though the venue is expecting criticism for commissioning the work, a spokesman said: ‘No-one should dispute Turnage’s choice of subject. The gaudily uninhibited Anna Nicole belongs in opera.’
Dutch soprano Eva-Maria Westbroek is to play the glamour model, who died from a drug overdose four years ago.
Her co-stars include Alan Oke as ‘Old Man Marshall’, and Wynne Evans, better known to millions of television viewers as the ‘Go Compare’ man.
‘She’s a very dramatic character who suffers a lot and is very extreme,’ Westbroek said of the role.
‘I really think, though, that she loved that old man, Marshall – but she wanted his money, too.’
Anna Nicole Smith died in February 2007 at the age of 39 from a drug overdose.
She was born in Texas as Vickie Lynn Hogan, and married her teenage sweetheart, Daniel Wayne Smith, aged 17.
She gave birth to their son in 1986, but in 1987 the couple separated. She embarked on a modelling career in 1991, and by 1992 was selected by Playboy boss Hugh Hefner to appear on the cover of the March issue. In 1993 she was named Playmate of the Year.
She met 89-year-old J. Howard Marshall in 1991, just as her modelling career was taking off, in Houston strip club Gigi’s.
He is said to have lavished her with gifts and asked her to marry him several times. In 1994, at the age of 26, she they eventually wed, but Marshall died just 13 months later.
A lengthy and complicated inheritance case followed as Smith and her husband’s son, E. Pierce Marshall, battled over her claim for half of her late husband’s US$1.6 billion estate.
Her death followed that of her beloved son Daniel, who died aged 20 the previous September from an accidental overdose, just days after visiting his mother and new baby sister in hospital.
Her baby daughter, Dannielynn, was the subject of a paternity case, as both her former boyfriend, Larry Birkhead, and her personal attorney, Howard K Stern, argued that they were the father. A paternity test later found Birkhead to be the father.
‘It was very hard writing something which moved from crazy-arsed comedy to utter bleakness,’ Thomas said.
Rupert Christiansen, The Telegraph, 30 January 2011
Anna Nicole: Opera thrives on sex and scandal – but the music is the key
Covent Garden’s new production about a Playboy pin-up sounds alluring but original opera is fiendishly difficult to get right, says Rupert Christiansen.
What makes a new opera any good? Although commonly considered as the most lordly, if not stuck-up, of art forms, opera is in reality no stranger to the stuff of tabloid journalism. Many of its heroines wouldn’t look out of place on the front page of Heat; Thaïs is a high-class hooker, Tosca murders the cop who tries to rape her, Salome is a psychotic teenager who makes love to a severed head, Lulu is a whore who ends up a victim of Jack the Ripper.
So we shouldn’t find anything inherently transgressive or surprising about the Royal Opera’s decision to commission composer Mark-Anthony Turnage and his librettist Richard Thomas (author of the brilliant musical satire Jerry Springer: The Opera) to mould their new opera Anna Nicole around the figure of a former Playboy model and television celebrity who married an oil billionaire and died from an overdose of prescription drugs.
Nevertheless, there is an element which is possibly unique to the project, which opens next month. Tosca and Salome are firmly creatures of legend: Anna Nicole Smith is scarcely even history yet. She died only in 2007, and her estate is still sub judice.
This won’t be the first time that opera has taken a subject hot from the press – it was once pointed out that most of the leading characters in John Adams’s Nixon in China (Nixon and his wife Pat, Madame Mao, Henry Kissinger) could theoretically have been present at its premiere in 1987 – but even as director Richard Jones and conductor Antonio Pappano enter rehearsals for the production, Anna Nicole Smith’s story is still being written, and controversially so.
Everyone at Covent Garden is being tight-lipped about the opera’s contents and reports suggest that lawyers have been anxiously checking the libretto in the light of possible litigation from Howard K Stern, the lawyer whose conviction for supplying the drugs that killed Anna Nicole was overturned in Los Angeles earlier this month.
Stern is a major character in the opera, played by baritone Gerald Finley, but his role will presumably now need careful rewriting. It’s a delicate matter, but doubtless one that will quickly be resolved. What will be less easy to determine, once the dust has settled, is the longer-term aesthetic issue Anna Nicole raises.
The opera business is increasingly concerned about its future and in particular its inability to capture the hearts and minds of a broader, younger audience beyond its circle of aficionados.
In pursuit of a formula that can open opera to this constituency more freely, a variety of strategies has been tried over the past 25 years, from a return to opera’s archaic roots (Birtwistle’s The Mask of Orpheus and The Minotaur) to an accommodation with rock music (John Adams’s I Was Looking at the Ceiling and Then I Saw the Sky).
En route, they’ve tried video and laser effects, mass nudity and orgiastic copulation, and every other shock-horror trick in the book. What works, and what doesn’t, and what can we expect from Anna Nicole?
There are few ground rules one can confidently prescribe, and one of the most important might be to ignore all the conventional wisdom. There’s an assumption that opera works best when it trades in big emotions, big tunes and the broad brush of melodrama, but no opera of the past quarter-century has been more successful than John Adams’s meditative, virtually plotless Nixon in China, which focuses on the totally unlikely subject of the American President’s diplomatic visit to Beijing in 1972.
Rules are there to be broken and an opera that tries to repeat the magic formulas of La Bohème or Carmen is going to be pallid and inert (which isn’t to say that nothing can be learnt from studying them).
Perhaps one could also usefully counsel a young would-be opera composer to bear in mind a lesson borne out by Benjamin Britten’s operas: clarity counts for a lot – words and detail don’t communicate themselves immediately in opera, and it’s vital to give the audience a narrative outline and strong characters that make an impact first time round, even if you can’t hear everything they’re saying.
Other advice might be purely negative. Taking some edgy or ‘real’ story-line or subject guarantees nothing except perhaps press coverage. Thomas Adès and Philip Hensher made a virtue of it in Powder her Face, their deliciously camp and curiously touching treatment of the fall of Margaret Duchess of Argyll, but operas about Princess Diana, Jackie Onassis, Colonel Gaddafi, cosmetic surgery, and assorted mass murderers have all melted into the ether. In each case, they failed for one simple reason – the music wasn’t good enough.
And this brings us to the heart of the mystery. The drama counts for slightly less than half of the operatic recipe, because ultimately music is what drives the drama and the text’s primary value isn’t its intrinsic literary merit but its capacity to inspire the composer.
A big mistake when it comes to writing music for opera today is a fear of being “inaccessible” or “elitist”. Nobody should ever be bored in the theatre, but this leads to a confused idea that the instant gratification that comes through resorting to the masturbatory excitements of minimalism, rock music clichés and Broadway razzmatazz constitutes a substantial artistic experience.
Composers such as Jonathan Dove in Britain and Mark Adamo in the United States work around this principle and although it certainly reaps short-term rewards – many people do find their operas instantly likeable and enjoyable – I am convinced that the operas they have produced to date will shortly be as deep in oblivion as those of Gian Carlo Menotti, opera’s false saviour of the Fifties, whose idiom closely imitated Puccini’s.
Every opera that has stood the test of the time, I would argue, has been composed at the forefront of musical language, creating its own sound-world.
And this is where the omens for Anna Nicole look good. Turnage’s previous operas Greek and The Silver Tassie are completely different in style and mood and brilliantly responsive to the respective dramas they embody. Turnage isn’t a composer who sits in the narrow ghetto of “modern” music – he is profoundly influenced by jazz and even cheekily inserted a reference to a Beyoncé hit into a recent orchestral work – but he is equally uninterested in dumbing down by aping Philip Glass or Stephen Sondheim’s game. And if Anna Nicole Smith’s story won’t automatically make a good opera – nothing does that – there’s certainly no reason why it can’t be made into one.
Yet whatever we think of Anna Nicole on the first night, we won’t know if it’s any good for at least 25 years. They booed the premieres of La Traviata and Madama Butterfly, and thought that Krenek’s Jonny spielt auf was going to be the biggest thing since the horseless carriage. Jonny what?
Anna Nicole Smith: some history
Born in Texas in1967, at 17 Anna Nicole Smith met and married her first husband, a chef, but left the marriage soon after son Daniel was born. Working as a stripper in Houston, she had breast implants to boost tips, and subsequently found fame as a Playboy centrefold. She later met billionaire J Howard Marshall II, who was 89 when they married in 1994. After 13 months he died, and his son took legal action to prevent her receiving his money. Smith died of a prescription drug overdose in 2007, pre-deceased by her son, also from drugs. She was survived by a daughter, now 4 – and an ongoing legal battle.
Jasper Rees, The Telegraph, 11 February 2011
Anna Nicole: Busty porn star? Perfect for operaThe men behind Covent Garden’s ‘Anna Nicole’ tell Jasper Rees why they had to tell the story of the late pole-dancer who snared a billionaire .
Anna Nicole Smith (vital statistics 39-27-39) freely admitted that she owed everything to the two bags of silicon she had inserted into her chest as a young stripper. They got her out of the graveyard slot at work, triggered a career in high-end soft porn, reeled in a nonagenarian oil billionaire husband and a Guess Jeans contract. But they also caused her huge discomfort, causing an addiction to painkillers that eventually contributed to her death in 2007. In sync with two of her vital statistics, she was 39.
No one could ever have imagined, however, that these two artificial spheres would one day jab open the doors of the Royal Opera House. When Anna Nicole was first announced, there was a predictable drum roll of jaws thwacking the floor. An opera about a bottle-blonde pole-dancer with synthetic embonpoint, who got ruinously snared in an epic legal tussle with her late husband’s family and whose drug-addled teenage son preceded her to the grave? Fallen women in previous centuries have much less of an accusing stench about them. Couldn’t the ROH have just stuck to La Traviata?
Two of the men responsible for this bold cultural yoking sit in an office in Covent Garden, explaining the decision to bring a modern parable about a trashy celebrity to the £195-a-ticket brigade.
“Most of the theatre-going public wouldn’t find this at all offensive,” says the composer Mark-Anthony Turnage. “Opera audiences are a bit more broad-minded than you think. Look how shocking Lulu is. Or Lady Macbeth. Salome has nudity! If people are coming here to be scandalised by how many swear words there are, they will probably be disappointed.”
In fact, says Antonio Pappano, the Royal Opera’s music director, the genesis of the piece did not involve any specific subject matter. “We wanted to commission an opera that wasn’t the expected atonal fest and anorak type of event. We wanted to have comic elements because the modern opera world is pretty dire in tone most of the time.”
The search for a subject took a turn towards the trailer park when Turnage met and befriended Richard Thomas, who with Jerry Springer: The Opera has done more than anyone to inject laughs into a long-faced art form. They agreed to collaborate and met for an hour a week to discuss narrative options. Who actually came up with the story of a stripper who married an oil billionaire, failed in court to secure any of his money and overdosed, is in dispute.
“I’m going to blame it on my wife Gabi,” says Turnage. “She suggested it to me, but also Richard had it on a list. The more we investigated, the more obsessive we became. I remember coming in for that meeting rather nervously.”
“And when you left, we were rather nervous, too,” says Pappano. His doubts focused naturally on Thomas’s propensity for spraying his libretti with Anglo-Saxon. He also needed to be persuaded this was a fit subject for an opera.
“Here’s a white-trash American symbol,” Pappano now says, “but also a symbol of what’s wrong with a lot of today’s society: fame at all costs, the fetishistic relationship of the cameras and the public, and ambition. It’s sordid, it’s lurid, it’s funny and pathetic, but ultimately the story is very sad. For me, that’s what makes it interesting.”
Meanwhile, Turnage had his own anxiety about composing music to words written by another composer, especially one whose work relies heavily on use of the chorus. “I find it hard to write for choruses. It’s not a natural thing.”
In the end, they worked as collaborators do in musicals, creating and cutting, building piecemeal. “Something that Richard had to really push me with was to keep it light. If you make it darker earlier on, it ruins the end.”
By the second half, the chorus can more or less slip off to the pub as Anna Nicole becomes a chamber piece heading inexorably for its pitiful climax. Among the arias sung by Eva-Maria Westbroek and, as her lawyer boyfriend Stern, Gerard Finley, there is one for her son Daniel that is simply a litany of the drugs which killed him.
Once the finished work was handed in, Pappano says he “came in and ruthlessly said, ‘This has got to go, this has got to stay in, why did you cut that!?’ I’m sure I got on their nerves a lot. But I smell those things.”
Bred in America himself, when he talks about the American idiom of Turnage’s music – elements of jazz, funk, soul, blues and even at one point pastiche striptease music – he starts jiving on his sofa. “It’s wonderful to be in a piece where I’m having to find grooves and not tempi so much.”
To go with the novelties onstage, there will be some in the pit. Turnage’s friend John Paul Jones, the surviving half of Led Zeppelin’s rhythm section, will be playing bass throughout as part of a jazz trio that also includes Weather Report’s drummer Peter Erskine and jazz guitarist John Parricelli.
One element of surprise they are eager to eliminate is the possibility of the ROH being served with a libel writ by figures portrayed onstage. “We’ve been very, very careful and making changes up until yesterday,” says Pappano. They don’t anticipate that anyone will be jetting into London to see themselves portrayed.
The dead, of course, can’t sue. But the hope of Turnage and Pappano is that they will have somehow redeemed this messed-up symbol of sordid contemporary values. “ You have to feel sympathy for Anna Nicole,” says Turnage. “ You have to feel that she wasn’t just this cartoon. Or the thing doesn’t work.”
Michael White, New York Times, 11 February 2011
A Tabloid Star Is Joining the Sisterhood of the Fallen
Drugs, sex, greed, grotesque behavior: it could only be opera, right? For all its chandeliers-and-Champagne style, opera has long enjoyed a voyeuristic interest in low life. Half its heroines are fallen women: Lulus, Violettas, Manons, briefly flourishing in sin and paying in the end. But opera’s love affair with sleaze takes on a new dimension on Thursday, when Anna Nicole Smith, the buxom Playboy centerfold, celebrity gerontophile and tabloid-culture princess (who died of an accidental drug overdose in 2007) takes to the lyric stage.
It happens at no less an establishment than the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, in “Anna Nicole,” a new opera that bears an adult-content warning on the posters, by the English composer Mark-Anthony Turnage. And it’s not passing without notice. British newspapers have been titillating their readers with the prospect of a night of sung debauchery and moral outrage since the project was announced. And those include publications whose views on opera wouldn’t normally extend beyond denouncing it as something swanky and elitist.
“It’s true,” Elaine Padmore, the director of opera at Covent Garden, said in a recent interview. “We’re getting coverage for ‘Anna Nicole’ in places we wouldn’t expect to take an interest in our productions, though if they think it’s going to be a girlie show, they’ll be disappointed. It may be a tacky subject, but it won’t be tackily staged.”
On paper “Anna Nicole” is a paragon of cultural credibility, involving A-list personnel like the stage director Richard Jones, the conductor Antonio Pappano, the Wagnerian soprano Eva-Maria Westbroek (soon to make her Metropolitan Opera debut as Sieglinde in “Die Walküre”) and the baritone Gerald Finley. A Royal Opera commission, it reflects the company’s commitment to feeding new work into the repertory. And as a work based on real, recent events much covered in the news media, it plays into the latter-day tradition of newsreel operas, like John Adams’s “Nixon in China,” now at the Met, a respectable precedent.
But it is a different precedent that has sent the British press into overdrive. For if the life and death of Anna Nicole Smith were not sensational enough as an idea for an opera, the libretto was written by Richard Thomas, the author of the infamously rude and risqué “Jerry Springer: The Opera,” which caused gleeful outrage on both sides of the Atlantic several years ago.
Mr. Thomas says that “Anna Nicole” won’t be so robustly scatological, although the Royal Opera warns on its Web site of “extreme language, drug abuse and sexual content.” The site nonetheless described the show as “a celebratory story of our times.” What exactly is it celebrating?
“Er, that’s a mistake,” Ms. Padmore said. “It’s meant to say ‘a celebrity story of our times,’ which is nearer the mark.” The wording on the site has since been changed accordingly.
“ ‘Anna Nicole’ is a parable,” Ms. Padmore continued, “a bad fairy tale about a character so larger than life she becomes surreal. It’s also very funny, although I don’t think it laughs at her. It’s not cruel.”
Still, it does raise the question: Why this subject? Did Ms. Padmore never have misgivings about taking on “Anna Nicole”?
“Of course,” she replied. “And people never tire of asking, but it’s the wrong question. The process of creating this opera didn’t start with her. It started with wanting an opera from Mark-Anthony Turnage. We talked over a long period about what the subject could be. Eventually he came up with Anna, and it seemed like the right fit for his approach to composition, which is steeped in jazz and the whole idiom of contemporary American music.”
Not that Mr. Turnage is himself a jazzman, or in any way American. At 50 he is one of Britain’s most successful classical composers. His work is championed by the conductor Simon Rattle, and his track record in opera has established him among the few composers today who truly know how to turn music into theater: a matter of gut instinct as well as technique.
This though he once told me: “I’m not really a big opera lover. I find a lot of it pretty dull, especially the bel canto stuff.”
And it is certainly true that bel canto stuff is not his natural world. Born in 1960 in Grays, Essex, one of the drabber satellites of the working-class East End of London, he made his name with music that projected upfront impact with a strident, streetwise edge: hard-hitting but seductive, in the way of desolate urban beauty, and politically aware.
His first opera, “Greek,” adapted a tough Steven Berkoff play about the English underclass and screamed with raucous energy that was in some ways autobiographical: a gauntlet thrown down by a boy made good from the sticks. These days, as a settled figure in the music world, he thinks too much has been made of his origins, and either way, he broke out of them. But like others who escape their background, he was never sure — and perhaps still isn’t — what he escaped into: an uncertainty that resounds in his work.
On one hand it’s conservatory-schooled contemporary music; on the other it’s profoundly influenced by American vernacular, bathed in a smoldering synthesis of rock, soul, jazz and blues. His solo instrument of choice has long been the saxophone. He hero-worships Miles Davis, a devotion that culminated a decade ago in “Blood on the Floor” (he likes strong titles), a piece that combined the improvisational talents of American jazz players with the impeccable craftsmanship of the Ensemble Modern of Frankfurt.
Aside from spawning a thousand feature articles about crossing cultural barriers, it touched a raw nerve: it was written in memory of Mr. Turnage’s brother, who had died from a heroin overdose. And it’s not hard to trace a route across the years from “Blood” to “Anna,” which appears to be borne out by his remarks about his new piece.
In a recent interview he described “Anna” as music “with a nod to Broadway and a ballad Susan Boyle could sing, although there’s not much else in the score you could do with Broadway voices.”
“It’s too complicated,” he added, “and there’s a full orchestra. It’s certainly more tonal than anything I’ve ever written. Act I ends in E flat. I guess you could say it’s a Puccini-size opera with jazz; and we’ve got some amazing players doing the jazz.” He cited his longtime acquaintances Peter Erskine, a drummer, and John Paul Jones, a guitarist from Led Zeppelin.
“Cool or what?” he said.
Cool is the word. But what is the word for Anna Nicole Smith? Outrageous? Tasteless? Where was the attraction?
“Well, I wanted something contemporary,” Mr. Turnage said, “something real, not mythic. Then, after getting nowhere, I met Richard Thomas, and we both, independently, came up with this idea. I wasn’t sure at first, but then I looked into her life and decided its strangeness gave it so much color there were possibilities. It’s a fantastic story.”
The only question was how much of the story to put in. And there was plenty to choose.
For those who may not remember, Ms. Smith was a poor girl from Texas who found fame by exposing her surgically enhanced breasts serially and showing there were no depths to which a determined social climber couldn’t profitably sink. At 26 she married an 89-year-old billionaire who obligingly died a year later; she became embroiled in tangled legal actions over the inheritance, then died herself at 39.
In between, she was a stripper, pinup, small-time actress and reality-TV star. And the highs or lows of her colorful existence included having a Caesarian delivery live on television; appearing in Pietà-style photos with her dead son (who died from a drug overdose in her maternity hospital room); having a whole posse of men claim paternity of her daughter (one of them a masseur married to Zsa Zsa Gabor, Frederic Prinz von Anhalt); and playing the part of an extraterrestrial kick-boxer in a film in which her mission was to save Earth.
You couldn’t make it up. Except that, in a modified way, making it up is what the authors of the opera had to do.
“We found that for all the media coverage it’s hard to pin down exactly what happened and what she was like,” said Mr. Thomas, the librettist. “There are too many conflicting accounts. At some point we had to decide for ourselves what she was. So we decided she was a fabulous eccentric who made it pretty much on her own terms. That was our starting point.
“Thereafter we’ve stayed as anchored to the documented facts as we can. But of course there’s an element of fantasy, as there has to be in a piece like this. As soon as you put speech in rhyming couplets, there’s a ‘take.’ ”
Ms. Westbroek, who sings the title role, confirmed that her instructions were “not to impersonate Anna, which is as well, because I don’t look like her.”
“She was actually very beautiful,” Ms. Westbroek added. “And of course there were those breasts.”
For the purposes of art, Ms. Westbroek will be wearing a cantilevered chest construction to portray the objects Smith called the source of everything she had, and it won’t make playing the part any easier. Ms. Westbroek, known for heavier roles by Puccini, Verdi and Wagner, is new to contemporary opera, and she admits to finding it a challenge.
“There’s coloratura in the vocal writing, which isn’t my thing,” she said. “I’m onstage almost the whole time, which is exhausting. But I’ve come to love Anna as a character. She had no limits. She was borderless. I don’t see her as monster.”
“Richard Jones calls the opera a homage to her soul,” Ms. Westbroek added, referring to the director, “and I guess that’s right. But I can’t pretend it isn’t tense, raising her from the dead with so much publicity.”
The tension dogging “Anna Nicole” relates less to raising the dead than to reinventing the living, including some highly litigious figures. Representing actual people on the stage is a dangerous business. And despite Ms. Padmore’s insistence that “we’ve had people looking carefully into all that,” there seems a sense of barely suppressed panic at the Royal Opera, as if the administrators had only just awakened to the potential consequences of what they have taken on.
Music journalists, myself included, have been refused access to rehearsals, copies of the score and even a look at the libretto. Neither Mr. Jones, the director, nor Mr. Pappano, the conductor, would talk. And as I write, a photographer sent by The New York Times has been denied official access to anyone involved.
The stated reason for this battening down of hatches is that the Royal Opera doesn’t want the piece prejudged by speculative, sensationalist gossip before it has appeared. But given an information void, the British press has filled it handsomely with speculation. What, you have to wonder, did the opera’s press representatives expect?
Or was it lawyers? Mr. Thomas said that to show a critic the libretto would count as publication. And recent developments in the Anna Nicole story in American courts suggests that a publication before opening night might be premature. It’s widely thought that significant parts of the text are falling prey to a red pen. “I seem to be attracted to litigious subjects,” Mr. Thomas said, “but I’ve tried to make this one as litigation proof as possible. The story’s public domain, the lawyers have been through everything, so it ought to be O.K. But it’s true that we haven’t made any contact with the people we’ve put in this piece, and we deliberately didn’t. It would have colored it. So far they haven’t made any contact with us either, so we don’t know what’s going to happen. But hopefully the answer is nothing.
“So much of the fuss that’s being made about this piece is groundless. If you took the same story, same scenario, same psychodrama, but instead of calling it ‘Anna Nicole,’ it was ‘La Contesse de Nicole’ and took place in 19th-century Paris, there’d be no problems at all. It’s a perfect story for opera: farcically tragic, utterly excessive. And opera deals with excess well. I know the topicality brings something else. And I do actually take the business of putting these people’s lives onstage seriously. It gives me nightmares. But I console myself with the fact that if it were me, I’d just love someone to put me on that stage. And if I could be sung by Gerald Finley, I’d be very happy.”
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