'Hydrogen Jukebox' a timely illumination of the American experience

"Whatever really great poetry I wrote," Allen Ginsberg once said, "I was actually able to chant, to use my whole body, whereas in lesser poetry, I wasn't. I was talking."

Ginsberg would not have been the same world-changing poet without his inherent musicality. He made American poetry breathe physically and spiritually as it had never before. His ecstatic breath was such that it attracted the varied musical likes of Leonard Bernstein, Bob Dylan, Paul McCartney, Patti Smith, the Clash and the Kronos Quartet. Director Robert Wilson and the late American composer Elodie Lauten are among those who created operas around Ginsberg's life and work. Ginsberg brought something valuable to them all.

But Philip Glass' "Hydrogen Jukebox," a 1990 collaboration with Ginsberg, did something even more valuable. The opera helped the poet himself breathe. And in a new production that opened Saturday night in San Pedro, Long Beach Opera has breathed valuable new life into a startlingly timely illumination of the American experience.
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