COMMENTARY : Fridamania--Where Will It All End? : A touring opera and a stalled film reflect how the life of Frida Kahlo has become a commercialized monster in multicultural America

Brace yourselves. Just when you thought you had seen the last Day-Glo key chain with her haunting face on it, the last expressway billboard from which she and her monkeys stare down at you, the last self-portrait T-shirt, the last bus advertisement--she’s b-a-a-a-c-k . And now she’s singing opera.

Having long ago transcended her historical personage, Frida Kahlo has been lately reincarnated as the supreme avatar of feminist art world radical chic. She is now La Santissima Frida, the first martyr of magical realism. Last week, “Frida,” an opera based on the tortured life of the Mexican artist, finished its New York premiere run at the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Majestic Theater. The opera, which was originally performed in 1991 in Philadelphia, is only the latest chapter in the ongoing transmogrification of Frida.

Other projects, such as “Frida and Diego,” a film planned by Teatro Campesino founder and director Luis Valdez, have faced extraordinary challenges. Valdez’s planned co-production between New Line Cinema and the Instituto Mexicano de Cine went sour when Laura San Giacomo was cast as Frida. On one side, New Line wasn’t convinced San Giacomo was a big enough box-office draw, while Latinos protested the role going to a non-Latina. With the project now on hold, Valdez describes his dealings with Frida as “like handling nitroglycerin.”

In all its myriad artistic and merchandising aspects, the Frida phenomenon almost amounts to a syndrome. Call it Fridamania. Or Fridaphilia. In some cases, it can lead directly to Fridaphobia.

Unfortunately, that was the emotion most consistently provoked by “Frida,” the opera. The elegantly produced music theater piece continues a recent trend. Like a lunar eclipse, Frida, the complex and fascinating person who lived, painted and died in Mexico, is blocked out by the shadow thrown by the sanctified Frida. Adding to the opera’s inundating waves of Frida worship, the lobby of the theater was devoted to “Pasion Por Frida,” a multimedia exhibition of the work of, about and inspired by She-of-the-Single-Eyebrow . All in all, the evening in Brooklyn was an orgiastic homage to Fridolatry.

The opera can’t be shorted for ambition. Conceived, written and directed by South African dramatist Hilary Blecher, “Frida” attempts to narrate the now almost legendary scenes from Kahlo’s life. The mischievous schoolgirl. The disfiguring bus accident. Her espousal of communism. Marriage to Diego Rivera. Romantic liaison with Leon Trotsky. Divorce from Diego Rivera. Remarriage to Rivera. Then a bedridden, painful death. And all the time, she is painting those images and self-portraits that pierce the atmosphere of ordinary imagination. With so many drawn to this unique life in the 20th-Century Americas, telling Frida’s story is a formidable task.

The things the characters say or sing make it very hard to take the spectacle seriously. Despite able, even well-intentioned, performances from Helen Schneider as Frida and William Rhodes as Diego, it’s hard to build up emotional intensity when Frida has to sing lines like “I live my life upside-down” to music as sentimental as an old silent-film score.

And you wince when, in an argument with Diego over their respective extramarital affairs, Frida protests: “You can’t compare Trotsky to one of your sluts!” Not even dancing mariachi skeletons and giant reproductions of Rivera murals can keep that kind of material stimulating. And, indeed, for the strong of heart intent on giving the second half of the show a fair chance, the lines at the coffee bar at intermission were extraordinarily long.

It’s not that artwork about Frida Kahlo shouldn’t be attempted. Like other art world fetish figures, like Vincent van Gogh, M. C. Escher and Rene Magritte, mass fascination is a sign of deeper resonances. With Frida, perhaps it is the precocious force of her feminine identity. Perhaps it is the fixity with which she gazed into her own multifaceted personae. Or perhaps her mestiza vision offers a filter into the numinous world of the exotic indigenous that renders it palatable to Western tastes.

But how can material as uncertain as “Frida” make it into production, even opening the prestigious Next Wave Festival at the Brooklyn Academy of Music? A more paranoid eye might suspect a vendetta against brilliant Latinas, since last year’s festival included Arto Lindsay’s still more dreadful paean to Carmen Miranda.

The cynic might find even darker designs though, in the fact that the exhibition accompanying “Frida” was “made possible” by Sotheby’s. In 1990, Sotheby’s auctioned Kahlo’s “Diego and I” for $1.43 million, taking the onerous honor of being the first painting by a Latin American artist to sell for more than $1 million. You might have to go back to Kirk Douglas’ campy portrayal of Van Gogh in the movie “Lust for Life” to see if even a bad biographical movie, or opera, can still boost the market value of the artist’s work.

As far as Frida-related products are concerned, Mitchel Soble, proprietor of Civilization, a hip art gift boutique in New York’s East Village, says it’s unclear whether the Fridamania market has peaked. “Frida Kahlo is a specialty item. Just because you have a Frida picture on a product doesn’t mean it’s going to sell. It depends what the product is, and if it’s slick or unslick.”

But in an interview regarding his own recent struggles with Fridamania, Luis Valdez insisted that “Frida would’ve resisted the commercialization of her image. She painted strong images of herself to stabilize her chaotic life. She felt how tenuous her hold on life was, and the paintings were a very personal way of dealing with that.”

Valdez’s fascination with Frida goes back 30 years, to when El Teatro Campesino first went to Mexico City and he made his first visit to Kahlo’s “Blue House” in Coyocan. “I became very aware of her as a powerful Mexican woman, and a powerful painter,” he remembered. “What took me by surprise was the way she later became an icon, and a late 20th-Century saint. She was not a saint!”

According to Valdez, the ultimate challenge in telling Frida’s story lies in getting past all the commercial hype, as well as the myriad images of herself she left behind. “You have to get to the human being,” he insisted. “Part of the reason she’s so powerful is that she was political in a movement that profoundly affected the 20th Century. She was biracial, and as such she becomes a symbol of America, the multicultural America of the late 20th Century. The key to Frida is through these various components of her complex personality.”

Valdez’s rancorous experience after the casting of Laura San Giacomo in the lead role of “Frida and Diego” illustrates how volatile the matter of Frida’s multiple identities can be. Would it have been preferable to cast a high profile Latina star? Who would that have been? Linda Ronstadt? Gloria Estefan?

Even an accomplished film actress such as Elizabeth Pena doesn’t have the critical mass box-office draw to appease a large studio’s executives. It is lamentable, even tragic, that at present there are no Latina peers to such names as Meryl Streep or Sigourney Weaver, but this is not a score that should be settled over the body of Frida Kahlo.

In fact, Frida’s powerful presence cannot be circumscribed by any ethnic literalism. If this were so, who would she be? What part Mexican? What part German or Jewish. The answer is as complex as the intertwining of veins and arteries in the famous painting “Las Dos Fridas,” where Kahlo painted her own double images as European and Indigenous.

What is unique about Frida is the corrosive energy of her vision, whether of herself or the world around her. In her openness to the worlds of the magical and her vulnerability to the many maladies that afflicted her, she brings a universal message about the personally transforming power of art to the very heart of the 20th-Century Americas.

Testifying to the power of Frida’s pervasive image, Luis Valdez joked that, “Because Frida focused so much on her own image, anyone can put on a tehuana dress, shade in her eyebrows, and she can look like Frida!”

In other words, no one holds the franchise on Frida Kahlo’s image. She relates to all humanity. While Latino actors and actresses must be free to practice their art and find ever larger audiences, directors must also be free to realize their artistic visions, even if it is a “Chicana” Frida performed by an Italian American actress. After all, the warmth and authenticity of the representation of Chicano family life in Valdez’s “La Bamba” was not undermined by the fact that the star, Lou Diamond Phillips, was not himself a Chicano.

The ill-starred opera “Frida” proves just how perilous treating Frida Kahlo’s life can be. Valdez describes those perils as “a minefield,” admitting frankly “we stepped on a mine.” With his project on hold, and “Frida” journeying next to the Houston Grand Opera, we must await that work that will bring us a new understanding of Kahlo, or perhaps exorcise Fridamania from us, once and for all.