'Anna Nicole' is caustic, hilarious - and very nearly moving

Eva-Maria Westbroek (right) as Anna Nicole Smith in a scene from the opera

On any given evening, the Royal Opera House is filled with the most famous poetry in opera - "none shall sleep," "love is like a wild bird" - but surely this week marks the first time that it heard a song of praise to fake boobs, ending with the chorus singing: "Golden Winnebagoes!"

Really, that's one of the few parts of the libretto fit to print in a newspaper where children and sensitive souls might stumble across it. Anna Nicole, the new opera based on the life of Anna Nicole Smith, the Playboy model and reality star who died of a drug overdose four years ago, is not a story for the faint of heart or stomach.

In fact, many had questioned whether composer Mark-Anthony Turnage ( The Silver Tassie) and librettist Richard Thomas ( Jerry Springer: The Opera) should have wasted their considerable talents, and three years of their lives, bringing the story of this poor, wasted, cracked doll to life. Of course they should: The result is caustic, hilarious, and very nearly moving.

The larger question is, can the story of Anna Nicole ever be exhumed from its gaudy wrapping of celebrity and irony, to reveal the human sorrow within? Because opera's worth nothing if it doesn't touch, and expose, a nerve. The answer to the question is - almost. The highs of Anna Nicole (in all senses) are very high, but her pathetic demise isn't quite as unsettling as it should be.

Turnage has called his opera a "comic horror story," and perhaps it's not possible to make that journey in 2 1/2 hours; it took Anna Nicole 39 years, after all. Turnage makes a heroic effort with his brass- and percussion-heavy score, which makes artful little nods at the best and worst of late-20th-century pop culture, from Top 40 radio to the louche sounds of peeler bars.

It is obvious from the moment you enter the Royal Opera House and are confronted with a glass case containing a zeppelin-sized brassiere next to the deadpan sign "Bra of Anna Nicole Smith" that you aren't in Mexia any more. Mexia (pronounced "Moo-HAY-a") is the one-cow town in Texas that Smith was desperate to leave, and it provides the first aria of the evening as Dutch soprano Eva-Maria Westbroek lolls in an oversized golden armchair surrounded by a chorus who look like Avon ladies on Quaaludes.

All of this could have been very easy meat: The American dream is toxic, celebrity kills, we get the picture. But Thomas, showing the keen eye he displayed in Jerry Springer, is much subtler than that. All the characters are complicit in their own downfalls. "In the East the burkha," sings Anna Nicole's mother, Virgie (a stirring Susan Bickley), "in the West the thong."

Westbroek, singing beautifully and utterly game for wearing prosthetic breasts and shaking her bottom at the pole-dancing club where she meets her octogenarian husband, is wonderful at conveying Anna Nicole's dumb-as-a-fox shtick. The Canadian baritone Gerald Finley is equally impressive as Anna Nicole's lover and lawyer Howard Stern, the villain of this piece. And if we didn't get the point, at his first entrance, the chorus sings, "Sauron of Mordor! Slayer of Bambi! Darth Vader!" "Anything else?" he shoots back smoothly, and the chorus replies: "Yoko Ono!"

At the end, poor Anna is wrapped in her body bag (I don't think this requires a spoiler alert), overloaded with gravy and pills. A pink curtain, replacing the usual red one that hangs at the Royal Opera House, falls on her life: The royal coat of arms has been cheekily altered so that Anna Nicole's face is surrounded by the motto Honi Soit Qui Mal Y Pense: Shame on those who think evil of it. After watching the complexity of the woman's life play out, you might add: Or her.

Anna Nicole