1984 the Opera

[Tuckerfan]

I may have to go see this.

“Every day, the news from Iraq feels like splashes on the telescreens in Oceania,” Thomas Meehan remarks, with a touch of fury in his voice. Meehan is talking about George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, which he and his fellow writer JD McClatchy have turned into an opera libretto for composer-conductor Lorin Maazel. Meehan - an operatic first timer, who describes himself with self- deprecating humour as “stepping from the crass world of Broadway to the crass world of opera” - is best known in the UK for Mel Brooks’s musical The Producers, though he has a huge number of Broadway hits and screenplays to his credit, including Annie, Hairspray and Brooks’s remake of Ernst Lubitsch’s To Be or Not To Be. McClatchy, well established in the US as a poet, teaches creative writing at Yale, and has already written several librettos, of which Emmeline, for Tobias Picker, is perhaps the most familiar.