Pumped Music Review

A couple of decades ago, opera composers began finding inspiration in newspaper headlines, a trend that opera fans and critics have debated vigorously. It brought the immediacy of current issues to the opera stage, but the transformation into opera sometimes trivialized those issues.

But contemporary life almost always offers a way to lower the bar. You could, for example, forget about the news and just log on to your e-mail and check the spam filter, where you’ll find all you need for an opera that is unlikely to be bogged down in arguments about whether the work lives up to its subject.

John Eaton’s “Pumped Fiction” is set in the world of penis enlargement. Its heroine, Daphne, is an aspiring writer and the personal assistant of Dr. Bloom, who declares himself, in a heroic baritone passage, “the leading manufacturer, distributor and patentee of penis pumps.”

Actually, Daphne’s assistance isn’t that personal: Dr. Bloom is in love with Eros, part mythological figure and part pornography star, who is first seen with a three-foot prosthesis affixed to his pants.

Mr. Eaton is an estimable composer whose best operas, among them “Danton and Robespierre” (1978), “The Cry of Clytaemnestra” (1980) and “The Tempest” (1985), are musically adventurous and dramatically pointed. In recent years he has created a line of lighter, shorter works he calls “pocket operas,” chamber-scaled scores in which the instrumentalists take on secondary dramatic roles.

In “Pumped Fiction,” which had its premiere on Wednesday at the Leonard Nimoy Thalia Theater at Symphony Space as the opening installment of the American Composers Alliance’s American Music Festival 2007, the compact vocal cast was enhanced by musicians in headgear (halos in a deathbed scene, penis hats in a dream sequence), who darted around the stage, both speaking and playing.

The libretto, by Estela Eaton, the composer’s daughter, is heavy with double-entendre: no opportunity is lost for references, subtle or otherwise, to size, solidity, standing or rising, and when Dr. Bloom says he has to pick up a package from Bangkok, memories of jokes told in the sixth grade were unavoidable.

Still, Ms. Eaton has a good ear for comic pacing, and she skewers not only the penis enlargement and pornography industries, but New Age religious cults as well.

Linda Larson, as Daphne, sang with clarity and power, although Mr. Eaton did her no favors by occasionally pushing the very top of her range. James Bobick was a vocally and dramatically nonchalant Dr. Bloom, and Ken Roht, though vocally weak, had the right look and moves for Eros.

Jennifer Roderer, Craig Philips and James Archie Worley sang smaller roles ably, and Christopher Oldfather, the pianist, and Meighan Stoops, the clarinetist, had the busiest extramusical jobs among the players. Beth Greenberg directed the economical production.

Almost lost amid this frivolity is Mr. Eaton’s considerable achievement: he proved that microtonality and the angular vocal and instrumental lines that typically evoke modernist angst can just as easily create manic comedy.

The Festival of American Music 2007 continues tonight at the Leonard Nimoy Thalia Theater, Symphony Space, 2537 Broadway, at 95th Street; (212) 864-5400.