“Nixon In China”: Trouble In Houston
John Adams’s “Nixon in China” is my favorite contemporary opera, so I was dismayed to read this report on the Houston Grand Opera’s new production: ‘”Instead of presenting Asians as human beings, we are offered a world of lazy stereotypes,” writes staff theater and opera critic Wei-Huan Chen about the opera’s version of the old Cultural Revolution ballet “The Red Detachment of Women,” “a representation of Asian people so nostalgic, so inaccurate and so out of touch with the way we talk about and view race in modern times that it at first evokes more confusion than disgust.†(That’s arguably a fair description of the original Red Detachment.)’
