That said, Eötvös provides a very elegant, supple, varied soundscape that serves as a kind of punctuation for the words, or sweeps across it like a yellow highlighter pen. Only the Angel really gets to cut loose and sing. Basically the score provides a kind of soundscape surrounding the text, some of which is spoken rather than sung. The abridged text reduces the characters to stock figures, and leaves even more loose ends than the play does it is never clear what the foul-mouthed lawyer Roy Cohn is doing here.Īnd until the end the music does not illumine the inner life of the people. ``I wish you could be more true to your ethnic profile,' says Prior Walter, a man living with AIDS, to the Mormon mother of his faithless lover. Kushner's demotic torrent of language, drawn from the melting pot of ethnic and regional American speech, makes the characters complex and surprising, the way people are. The extreme condensation of the play in Mari Mizei's libretto jettisons all but the personal and apocalyptic dimensions. Whether Peter Eötvös's musical adaptation fulfills the play's operatic potential remains an open question, despite the overall excellence of Opera Unlimited's American premiere production Friday night. It is full of larger-than-life characters who deliver long aria-speeches of interior questioning characters meet each other in dream landscapes and there are interwoven, simultaneous episodes that resemble operatic ensembles. Tony Kushner's ``Angels in America' is an epic, historical, political, personal, and apocalyptic drama that is also an opera waiting to happen. Friday night (repeats Tuesday night and Saturday, a matinee)

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