THE WUBBULOUS WORLD OF OPERA The scathing reviews of the New York City Opera’s premiere of “Lilith” are a sign of just how bad it was: There’s so little new opera that reviewers long to praise. But maybe the company should have seen disaster coming. Composer Deborah Drattell explained she was “attracted to women who triumph over the odds”–which leaves one confused about why she chose Lilith, Adam’s first wife according to some mystical Jewish writings. “It’s not a typical opera in the sense of boy meets girl,” Drattell admitted. Still, the story might have worked if the music hadn’t consisted mostly of bass and drum rumbles under the vocals, if Eve and Lilith hadn’t spent the entire opera in their underwear, if a male dance troupe hadn’t swirled around them for two hours dressed as Hasidim, and if the lyrics by David Steven Cohen hadn’t consisted of lines like “Wind Water Want. Washing away regret. Wind Water Want.” The producers might have gotten their first hint of impending doom from Cohen’s resume–which, according to Playbill, includes the theme song for “The Wubbulous World of Dr. Seuss.” He’s had songs performed “by Elaine Stritch, Megan Mullally, Melanie Chartoff, and the Cat in the Hat,” and his credits include “Pee-Wee’s Playhouse,” “Tiny Tunes,” “ALF,” and “Courage the Cowardly Dog.” “‘Lilith’ is Mr. Cohen’s first opera libretto.” We guessed as much. BOOK OF THE WEEK The Catholic Alternative: George Weigel on the Church By J. Bottum The Truth of Catholicism: Ten Controversies Explored by George Weigel (HarperCollins, 196 pp., $24). “When I was young,” F. Scott Fitzgerald said, “the boys in my street still thought that Catholics drilled in the cellar every night with the idea of making Pius the Ninth autocrat of this republic.” Of course, that was back in the good old days, when people still worried that Catholicism would use America to advance its secret, Jesuitical agenda. The great unwritten story these days is how America uses Catholicism. It’s all so confusing. The “Catholic vote” hasn’t existed for years. The pews are filled with nominal Catholics who ignore their Church on moral matters, and the streets with lapsed Catholics who ignore everything else as well. Catholicism ought not to matter, and yet, somehow, it does. For politicians, commentators, editorial writers–indeed, for most Americans–the Catholic Church performs a massive symbolic function for the United States today. Whether one hates it or embraces it, Catholicism is the center of the nation’s arguments about abortion, euthanasia, cloning, homosexuality, and nearly every other moral issue. To understand what it is about the Catholic Church that lets it be used this way, George Weigel’s “The Truth of Catholicism” is the place to begin. Weigel is best known for his definitive 1999 biography of John Paul II, “Witness to Hope” (recently issued in an updated paperback edition). In “The Truth of Catholicism” he takes up ten theological, moral, and political controversies, explaining Catholicism’s position on suffering, salvation, and democracy. His account of the pope’s theology of the body is particularly fascinating. When Weigel says the “truth of Catholicism,” he means to set forth the unity of Catholicism’s vision for human life. The book is written in a clean, nonpietistic voice, and it presents what we might call the “Catholic alternative”–the alternative to commercialized, scientized, and sexualized life that makes the symbol of Catholicism loom so large in America. “The brave new world is a world of rationally organized self-indulgence,” Weigel observes. “The world of the saints is a world of radical, extravagant self-giving. . . . Which is the more human world? Which is the more liberated? Which is the world on which you would want to bet your life?”
