Mark Grey News

For the first time, the Metropolitan Opera will present a work by Pulitzer Prize-winning composer John Adams: Doctor Atomic, his opera about J. Robert Oppenheimer and the creation of the atomic bomb. The piece is set in New Mexico in the summer of 1945, as scientists, led by Oppenheimer, and the military prepare to test the first nuclear bomb, events that will radically change the course and fabric of history. The new production, starring Gerald Finley in the title role, will open at the Met on Monday, October 13, at 8:00 p.m. When the opera premiered in San Francisco in October of 2005, The Guardian said, 'Adams's ecstatically lyrical writing and the music's visionary eloquence make this a modern masterpiece.' The New York Times later wrote that Doctor Atomic was 'the most complex and inventive of Mr. Adams's works, an engrossing operatic drama.'