OPERA REVIEW : ‘Marilyn’ a Bombshell? Well, Not Exactly . . . : NYC Opera Celebrates Its 50th With Ezra Laderman’s New Work

She slithers modestly about the stage in a silky teddy. She models an ocean of phony blond waves. She suffers the slings and arrows of outrageous Hollywood while mouthing aching aphorisms.

After much meandering foreplay, she gets to clamber upon her own bier, wrap herself picturesquely in a crimson sheet--ah, symbolism--and sing a Liebestod that lacks Liebe .

Well, that may not be quite right. Instead of a loveless love-death, think of an immolation scene minus the fire.

Oh, dear. This isn’t our Marilyn.

This is Ezra Laderman’s “Marilyn,” the bizarre and excruciatingly banal Monroe doctrine that serves as the focal point of the New York City Opera’s 50th anniversary celebrations.

The world premiere took place Wednesday night at Lincoln Center. The you-had-to-be-there audience was amazingly polite.

The New York State Theater doesn’t happen to be a particularly happy place these days, big birthday notwithstanding. Financial disaster is knocking at the door once again. Christopher Keene, the general director and de facto leading conductor, languishes far away on medical leave. Critical successes have been scarce of late.

But history has marked the New York City Opera as a company that thrives on ambitious adversity. As they like to say in the battlefields of Vienna, the situation is hopeless but not serious.

And--who knows?--the situation might improve with the next two premieres, which are scheduled to follow in unprecedented succession: Lukas Foss’ “Griffelkin” and Hugo Weisgall’s “Esther.”

It is unlikely, in any case, that things will get worse. The soggy saga of Norma Jeane Baker, as told by the distinguished 69-year-old dean of the Yale School of Music to a fuzzy and, worse, tawdry text by Norman Rosten, sustains a lot of frantic motion as it goes nowhere.

Laderman’s carefully crafted--let’s not say academic--score is the sort of creation that gives eclecticism a bad name. The composer provides his own prophetically muddled apologia in the program booklet:

“The music has tonality, it has lyricism, it is atonal, there are times I embrace serialism, modality, there is also pop music, jazz, folk moments.”

All that must be true. Still, the disparate elements are so mechanically integrated that “Marilyn” sounds pretty much the same from the dull opening cliches to the dull closing ones that come a-creeping 2 1/2 hours later. Old-fashioned formula modernism is alive if not well at Lincoln Center.

The orchestra does a lot of noodling and doodling. Between the reflective rest stops, the short-winded vocal lines do a lot of chugging and gurgling. It is all deceptively complex.

The word setting is so inapt--and the English articulation of the cast so lazy--that one actually is grateful for the redundancy of English supertitles. Grateful, that is, until one gets tangled in the treacle of Rosten’s libretto.

The climax of self-revelation presumably materializes in a big trio. The action, if one can call it that, stops long while the characters bare their souls with stultifying simplicity.

“I’m in a room,” chirps the titular ingenue. “The door is locked. I don’t know if I’m locked in to keep the men out or afraid to let them in.”

“Love kills and cures with the same song,” counters an all-purpose admirer identified simply as the Senator. At least he isn’t musing, as he does so much of the time, about bullets.

Meanwhile, the baritonal shrink--another admirer and another convenient composite character--babbles onward and sideways about setting Marilyn free “beyond the pain and into the world, a deeper thing than you have known.”

Deeper, indeed. There’s a tune in my heart. Life can be beautiful. The bluebird of happiness can be elusive. Please pass the soap.

The economical production was conceived, designed and directed by Jerome Sirlin. His credentials include osculation of a spider woman on Broadway, manipulation of a hydrogen jukebox in Brooklyn, and touring volation of a thousand rooftop airplanes throughout America and Europe. He is, no doubt, a technological wizard, and the City Opera management was, no doubt, wise to enlist his services for all three golden-anniversary novelties.

In “Marilyn,” his narrative apparatus entails a progression of photographic projections on upstage scrims, with a few furniture props defining mundane locales in the foreground. Sometimes the proceedings are genuinely fanciful. Sometimes they suggest little more than a concert illustrated with a fancy slide slow. (Jeff Davis served as all-important lighting virtuoso.)

The primary images involve cinematic illusion. Poor Marilyn is hounded, we are told, in her glamorous life and in her pretty death by a camera crew. All the world’s a movie.

Get it?

The cast worked hard. Most of the time it worked hard against impossible odds.

Kathryn Gamberoni looked pert rather than sultry as Marilyn, and kept the Monroe mannerisms to a grateful minimum. Although she evaded caricature, she never managed to suggest, much less define, the essential charisma. This Marilyn could just as well have been Jayne Mansfield, or, more likely, Debbie Reynolds. She also might have been an unusually dazed Adele in a spangly-dressed “Fledermaus.”

Gamberoni sang the conversational chatter and difficult, high-flying vocalises sweetly--also, it would seem, accurately. One certainly had to admire her concentration, her dedication and her stamina.

The members of the supporting cast were required to impersonate types, not people. Michael Rees Davis stumbled through the tenor platitudes assigned the senator. Ron Baker bumbled through the baritone platitudes assigned the psychiatrist. Philip Cokorinos grumbled through the bass platitudes assigned the ex-husband.

Susanne Marsee served honorably as Marilyn’s sympathetic secretary. Michele McBride struck the right poses as her dizzy half-sister. John Lankston and Jonathan Green did fatuous buffo duty as the most obvious villains in the piece, defined as Mogul I and Mogul II.

Additional performances of “Marilyn” are scheduled for Saturday and Tuesday. The chances of survival beyond that would seem a bit precarious.