Discover Mark-Anthony Turnage's opera
Anna Nicole
A celebrity story of our times
Mark-Anthony Turnage’s new opera commissioned by the Royal Opera House is a contemporary take on the doomed heroine of operatic tradition. It is based on the well-recorded life and times of Anna Nicole Smith, the small-town American blonde who transformed herself into an international sex symbol. She married a billionaire over sixty years her senior and became a notorious tabloid fixture, before a swift descent into depression, drug dependency and debt. She died of a drugs overdose at the age of 39.
The libretto is penned by Richard Thomas, British co-author of the notorious 2003 musical Jerry Springer: the Opera, famous for its profanities, dark humour, dysfunctional characters and surreal images of American pop culture. Thomas has a keen ear for modern American idioms and his punchy libretto comes with a warning about its extreme language and adult content. In Anna Nicole, Thomas re-explores celebrity culture and its rapacious consumption of naive wannabes for the amusement of a mass audience.
The music comes from British composer Mark-Anthony Turnage. He created a stir with his first opera Greek (1988) which established him internationally as an original voice who could combine classical traditions with modern culture, including jazz elements in his music. His next opera The Silver Tassie was based on Sean O'Casey's 1926 tragic play set in Dublin during World War I. First performed in 2000 by English National Opera, it won both the South Bank Show Award and Olivier Awards, and was hailed as a brilliant new form of narrative opera. If Richard Thomas is a master of modern tabloid idioms, Turnage can match it with a brilliant world of sound, ranging from witty American jazz to subtle passages illustrating the characters’ most intense emotional states. Turnage and Thomas’s collaboration is both comic and tragic in turns, an evocation of the confusion of our consumerist and media-dependent times.
What the papers say
Peter Conrad, The Observer
Imagine the love goddess Aphrodite fitted with silicone-swollen boobs, bloated by junk food, slowed down by pills and befogged by booze: that was Anna Nicole Smith. The heroine is our contemporary, or would be if she were still alive; but she was also a mythical being – an artificial deity, the superhuman embodiment of our faults and follies, invented and marketed as an object of desire. Read more.
SYNOPSIS
by Richard Thomas
ACT I
Scene Zero
A three-bar overture.
Scene 1
Anna is introduced. She is fabulous. And eccentric. Fabulously eccentric.
Scene 2
Anna establishes one thing: She was born in a town called Mexia, pronounced ‘Mu-HAY-ah’. This phonetic problem is the town’s main claim to fame and is incorporated in the town’s motto: ‘A great place no matter how you pronounce it!’ Anna wants out. Big time!
Scene 3
We meet the family: most importantly, Anna’s mother, Virgie, and her son, Daniel. Mom Virgie frowns at Anna’s life but her heart always melts for the cataclysmically cute Daniel. Daniel is the love of Anna’s life. The Lawyer Stern is momentarily introduced and then pushed off stage.
Anna, divorced and broke, heads for the bright lights of Houston. Faced with the prospect of low-wage jobs and grunt work, Anna decides to jump…
Scene 4
Anna enters the world of the ‘Gentlemen’s Club’. The earning potential is vast. All cash, no IRS. But there is a problem…
Scene 5
Problem solved: breast implants. Up side: more attention, more cash. Down side: chronic back pain for the rest of her life. On returning to the ‘Gentlemen’s Club’, Anna soars. And she meets the holy of the holies: The Rich One.
We meet the oilman, J. Howard Marshall II. Marshall falls under her spell. He wants Anna. He takes Anna. Her life is transformed. She asks for a ranch. But… There ain’t no such thing as a free ranch.
Scene 6
Anna gets the ranch but it didn’t come for free. The world opens up for Anna. With the prospect of unlimited cash she seethes with ambition.
Scene 7
Anna marries J. Howard Marshall II. Virgie (Mom) explodes with rage and disgust. No one listens. The Lawyer Stern gives Anna his card. Daniel brings Anna her pills and she looks forward to a life of wealth – and chronic back pain.
Act II
Scene 8
Cosy scene between Marshall and Anna where Anna explains what it feels like to be famous and how good it is to walk down the red carpet.
The Lawyer Stern enters. He has completely fallen under Anna’s spell.
Scene 9
Anna, the Patron Saint of Parties, throws the party of all parties. Virgie moans about childcare and Marshall collapses. This throws a big ol’ downer on the party.
Scene 10
Marshall dies. Virgie reminds Anna and the audience that there is no will. Marshall’s family refuse to give Anna a dime. Stern and Anna furiously demand their day in court.
Interlude - Ten years pass…
Scene 11
Anna has put on weight. She is now addicted to painkillers. She screams at the Lawyer Stern for more drugs. He tries to withhold them from her but she gets them in the end. Stern gently admonishes Anna for becoming a public relations disaster. An older Daniel gives his Mom a backrub.
Scene 12
Larry interviews Anna and the Lawyer Stern. We learn that they have been fighting Marshall’s family for ten years and still haven’t got a cent. Anna claims she is off drugs and is making a comeback. There is a live link to her dogs. Anna howls with joy.
Scene 13
The Lawyer Stern, clearly in control of Anna’s life, tells the assembled press how Anna’s week will pan out. Anna tells him she is pregnant. Anna eats. A. Lot.
Scene 14
In a moment of genius, the Lawyer Stern manages to sell Anna’s birth to Pay Per View. She gives birth. For a brief moment she has it all.
Scene 15
Three days after the birth of her baby girl, Daniel comes to visit. He dies a horrible death. Anna goes crazy with grief. The Lawyer Stern takes a picture.
Scene 16
Anna loses the will to live. Her estranged mother weeps for all mothers. The camera keeps filming.
Anna zips herself into a bodybag and with one last parting kiss quits the scene.
Characters
Anna Nicole: A Texan girl who becomes an international sex symbol, via a pole-dancing club and marriage to an elderly Texan oil billionaire.
Howard Marshall II: Anna Nicole’s elderly billionaire husband, whom she meets in a pole-dancing club. He quickly promises to ‘buy her her own ranch’, and dies intestate after 13 months of marriage. Anna Nicole commences a lawsuit to wrest her share of the inheritance from his family.
Stern: the legal eagle who helps Anna Nicole in her lawsuit. He is her constant companion as lawyer, friend and advisor.
Daniel: Anna Nicole's son by her first husband.
Virgie: Anna Nicole’s mother, who disapproves of Anna Nicole’s lifestyle.
Cousin Shelley: A relation of Anna Nicole
Larry King: US chat show host who interviews Anna Nicole and Stern.
Billy: Anna Nicole’s first husband whom she meets while working in a fried chicken restaurant.