Beneath the lacquered surface there is more lacquer. What comes of it all is a visually striking but coy and insubstantial work. Despite interesting poetic ambitions, the text remains at heart the material for a good-natured skit, not the political or social satire one might expect. Miss Goodman's episodic libretto has seriocomic potential, though in performance it was only intermittently understandable despite the composer's reliance on a prosaically chanted recitative style. This Dick and his loyal Pat are innocents abroad, a confused Rotarian couple swept up in incomprehensible events. Henry Kissinger comes in for fairly harsh ribbing, but a cartoonish Mr. ''Nixon in China'' comes to life, when at all, chiefly through its grab bag of clever scenic effects, such as the descent from the sky over Beijing of the Presidential jet, and by senior-revue jokes at the expense of quasi-historical characters who one might have thought were beyond caricature. The comparison, however, collapsed quickly. In prospect, the work had suggested parallels with ''The Mother of Us All,'' the Virgil Thomson-Gertrude Stein masterpiece that also fondly reflects a moment in American history as if in a funhouse mirror. The libretto, by Alice Goodman, offered moments of wry humor and poignancy, dealing in a mock-mythic style with President Nixon's peacemaking trip to China in 1972. Sellars, instead of employing his directorial talents to revise operas by dead composers, was collaborating this time with a living one, John Adams. Though grandly proportioned, the Houston Grand Opera production turned out to be a Peter Sellars variety show, worth a few giggles but hardly a strong candidate for the standard repertory. That was it? That was ''Nixon in China''? Finally, on Thursday evening, we had the world premiere of the most heavily publicized and shrewdly promoted new opera of this decade.
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