I Was Looking at the Celing & Saw the Sky

American Opera Classics - Adams: I Was Looking at the Ceiling and I saw the Sky / Simon / Composer: John Adams, Performer: Kimako Xavier Trotman, Jeannette Friedrich, Markus Alexander Neisser, Martina Mühlpointner, Conductor: Klaus Simon, Orchestra/Ensemble: Band of Holst Sinfonietta, Young Opera Company Freiburg Number of Discs: 2 The plot, taken from the John Adams Web site, is as follows: in mid-1990s Los Angeles, David, a preacher, sings about his many love affairs and his current girlfriend, Leila. Dewain is arrested by Mike, a homophobic cop, for stealing two bottles of beer while trying to reach his lover, Consuelo, who is afraid that her son has been arrested by the INS. Tiffany videotapes the arrest; she wonders why Mike is not more receptive to her advances. Dewain resists arrest and Mike has him charged with a felony, meaning he could go to jail for 45 years under the "Three Strikes" law. At his trial, David, his lawyer, tries to explain his client's point of view. After questioning Tiffany, Rick begins to be attracted to her. David visits Dewain in jail, where Dewain tells him he's decided to go to law school. Leila wonders if David will ever settle down. As act II opens, Leila and David are making out on the couch in David's office in his church when an earthquake hits. Leila is knocked unconscious. Mike visits Tiffany's house; she asks him why he hasn't been more forward, and he has a crisis of sexual identity; Rick suddenly appears, and she asks him out instead. Dewain, in his cell, recounts how the walls split open and he could see the outside, but, realizing that he was better off working inside the system, he did not escape. Consuelo tells him she is going back to El Salvador to fight for political freedom; Dewain decides to stay in Los Angeles. Lying in David's arms, Leila begins to recover. At the time of the premiere, Peter Sellars, the original director, offered up the hope that the work would become the play of choice for high schools everywhere. That seems as unlikely now as it did then (should anyone care, the high school musical of choice, once the rights become available, will be William Finn's The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee), in part because of the sexual and sometimes heavy-handed political content as well as the sheer difficulty of the music. For all it's flaws, the work gains enormously in stature when heard complete and, to set the show in context, it is a whole lot more interesting musically than Rent or any of the Andrew Lloyd Webber "Rock Operas."