Dazzled by a Dance Opera.

THE NEW THEATER season is still young, and it's way too early to make blanket statements. But I'll go out on a limb: The most dazzling musical theater staging of New York's 2000/2001 season has already come and gone, and most theatergoers missed it. It can't win a Tony, it won't tour to your hometown, the dance routines will never show up in a Gap ad and only a handful of connoisseurs will buy the original cast album--if, that is, some idealistic record label troubles to produce it.

It was an opera.

Don't panic--it wasn't some gilded Aida or modern-day Boheme; it was new. And that's the point. Contemporary opera boasts some of the most innovative theatrical practice around, yet it remains pretty much beyond the sweep of the Broadway radar. Broadway was abuzz last season about the dance musical Contact; no one would call Writing to Vermeer a dance opera. Yet, like Contact, it is choreographed from beginning to end, and in ways the Broadway musical has yet to dream of. So you'd think the theater world would be abuzz this season about the Lincoln Center Festival presentation of Writing to Vermeer. You'd be wrong. And the only reasons I can think of--snobbery and ignorance--are just not good enough.

Vermeer is the brainchild of that prickliest of film directors, Peter Greenaway. He enlisted the Dutch composer Louis Andriessen, who provided a shimmering score, and then mounted it for the Netherlands Opera in collaboration with Saskia Boddeke. Its premise is remarkably simple: Three women in the household of Holland's great painter of women at home--Vermeer's wife, his mother-in-law and his model and mistress--write him letters while he is away on a business trip. Like the paintings, the opera is about tranquil interiors; but in contrast to the paintings, the opera recognizes the possibility of domestic calamity--the illness of a child--and the existence of external events that, in 1672, when it is set, were disastrous indeed.

Although masses of extras pour on and off the stage during the opera's two-hour duration (along with great quantities of drenching liquids), and wars, assassinations and conflagrations are referred to, the three women of Vermeer's household are the opera's only named characters, and the text of their fictional letters--chatty, mundane, loving--furnishes most of the libretto.

It may not sound theatrically promising, but by using techniques that are by no means unfamiliar, Greenaway and Boddeke have managed to create a theater event that looks boldly different from anything we've seen before. Of course, it helps if you can count on Jan Vermeer for some of your scenery and costumes and yes, lighting. By making imaginative use of projections that bathe the entire stage in text or magnify pertinent details from Vermeer paintings, by providing each of the three women with two matching alter egos and creating a kind of visual chorus of servants, by finding potent stage symbolism to represent historical events like the flooding of the lowlands to hold back an invading army, Writing to Vermeer becomes a magnificent lesson in stagecraft.

Michael Simon's architectural set provides canals and bridges and platforms for almost cinematic scene changes. Emi Wada, the costume designer, has reproduced in loving detail the yellow satin jacket trimmed in ermine, the starched white wimple and the pearly earrings of the paintings. And Simon's lighting turns each arrangement of figures--women scrubbing the floor or writing their letters--into a painterly composition.

Greenaway trained as an artist, and he has a painter's imagination; his films brim with allusions to art history. He's no doubt responsible for much of the striking imagery in Vermeer. But it was Boddeke who turned the piece from a series of gorgeous stage pictures into a virtually nonstop succession of dance moments. It was her decision to stage the work with two doubles for each of the three singers. So even when there are only three characters on stage, there are nine figures, often moving in stylized synchronization with one another. Whether they are scrubbing the black-and-white squares projected onto the raked stage to mimic the floor tiles depicted in Vermeer's paintings or lifting their skirts to wade across the canals that surround the playing area or lining up across the stage to raise their wine-filled glasses in a celebratory toast, the women of Vermeer's house are always as carefully posed as the models in his paintings.

I'm not sure I'd be ready to embrace a Greenaway-Boddeke production of, say, Damn Yankees. But watching this bewitchingly beautiful theater work unfold, I couldn't help transposing into its outlines imaginary productions of, say, A Chorus Line or Nine (which would, I suppose, have to become Twenty-Seven). What if Mark Morris had been as daring with Capeman as he's been with baroque opera, and mounted it in a similarly abstract way?

Morris, of course, is one of the handful of artists who have directed musical theater both on Broadway and in the opera house. Hal Prince is another. And yes, there are music theater festivals and conferences that treat musicals and operas as different birds of the same feather. But on the whole, the two worlds simply exist independent of each other, as if they weren't mining the same territory, as if they had nothing to learn from each other.

As with most prejudices, this one can go in two directions. In a recent interview, Gia Kourlas asked the inventive and eclectic Bill T. Jones if he went to musicals. His eclecticism didn't extend quite that far. "I can't," he told her. "They always seem too long and kind of dumb." While there are plenty of modern choreographers who wouldn't be so dismissive of one of America's brightest inventions--and wouldn't turn down the opportunity to work in musical theater, as Jones has--how much theatrical know-how is being denied our musical theater because unnecessarily rigid lines have been drawn?

Dance Magazine theater columnist Sylviane Gold has written theater criticism for the SoHo Weekly News, The Boston Phoenix and The Wall Street Journal. Her dance reviews appear regularly in Newsday.