Fifty Nine Productions Ltd.

ABOUT THIS PROJECT

After a highly successful run at the Metropolitan Opera New York, John Adam's Doctor Atomic transfers to the English National Opera at the London Coliseum. Mark Grimmer and Leo Warner provide the video design for the production, directed by Penny Woolcock and designed by Julian Crouch.

Opening on February 25th, the production runs for 9 performances only, closing on March 20th.

For more information and to book tickets, click here

SELECTED REVIEWS

"Gerard Finley [is] classy in John Adam's Dr Atomic...The baritone, director Penny Woolcock and set and video designers do much to enliven [this] operatic drama about the nuclear bomb."

Sunday Times

"The look of Penny Woolcock’s excellent staging, designed by Julian Crouch, beautifully complements the musico-dramatic thrust of Adams’ work. With the sculptural look of an art installation (which was its inspiration) fragments of debris hang suspended, as if mid-explosion, while tented sheets rise up to invoke the desert mountain ranges of New Mexico. Tiered boxes house the Los Alamos project personnel as if they themselves are the objects of experimentation – human guinea pigs. Videos of scientific formulae (Fifty-Nine Productions) play on every surface; at one point, a map of Hiroshima eerily burns."

**** Independent

"Penny Woolcock’s production...already seems much tighter than it did at the New York Met. It’s certainly worth a visit. Once again Adams has turned 20th-century history into absorbing, provocative music-theatre."

**** The Times

"ENO captures the zeitgeist once again by bringing John Adams’s latest opera Doctor Atomic to the British stage for the first time. The director is Penny Woolcock, who filmed Adams’s Death Of Klinghoffer for television, and her production is shared with the New York Met — further evidence that ENO is now in the big league."

**** Evening Standard

"Adams's portrayal of the events leading up to the testing of the first atomic bomb in the New Mexico desert in July 1945 is far more convincing musically and dramatically than it seemed at its premiere. Woolcock's naturalistic staging, with designs by Julian Crouch and carefully gauged video projections, is far less cluttered and tendentious than Sellars's original."

**** The Guardian

"If a work forces you, simultaneously and uncomfortably, to clench your limbs and hold your breath, you have to take notice...If the earth didn't move for you, it did for me."

Observer

Selected US Reviews

"...[Woolcock's] production mixes metaphorical imagery and poignantly human interactions in dramatically involving ways. Seldom has the Met made such elaborate use of videos and electronic sound resources...." International Herald Tribune