‘Harvey Milk’: Gay Liberation at the Opera : Music review: Although the work premiered in Houston in January, its New York opening was considered the big test for this quasi-historic extravaganza.

Nixon and Mao did it in John Adams’ China. Malcolm X did it with a little help from Anthony Davis. Einstein did it on Philip Glass’ beach. Gandhi did it, courtesy of the same minimal ventriloquist, in “Satyagraha.”

And now, folks, Harvey Milk is doing it. The openly gay San Francisco city supervisor, murdered by a putatively Twinkie-crazed homophobe in 1978, sings.

And that ain’t all, folks. He sings with a nice, ripe, high-falutin’ baritone in a pretentious, potentially grand opera.

The vehicle--politically if not musically correct--is simply called “Harvey Milk.” With an all-purpose pop-schlock-and-chaos score by Stewart Wallace and a brash poster-art text by Michael Korie, it attracted a lot of attention at its premiere in Houston in January. It moves on to Germany in December and comes “home” to San Francisco next year.

Many observers felt, however, that the big test for this quasi-historic extravaganza occurred Wednesday night, when it came to Lincoln Center. As some hopelessly myopic sage put it long ago, “There are only two places for music in America--New York and Out of Town.”

Opening at the feisty New York City Opera, alas, “Harvey Milk” did not seem to change the course of culture as we know it. The ambitious docu-saga stumbled and bumbled across the stage for three tedious hours, its intentions bright and its achievements dim.

Good subject. Bad opera.

Korie’s libretto follows its hero, quite literally, from the closet to the Castro to City Hall. En route, the narrative pauses for reflection on the nature of prejudice. It toys with momentous parallels between religious and sexual persecution.

“I stand up for myself as a Jew,” blares our mellifluous protagonist. “Why not as a man who loves men?”

The opera ends with what may be the ultimate Kaddish-apotheosis. Milk is appointed to instant sainthood as a handsome bare-chested messenger-cum-muse leads him aloft. Before beatification, however, Milk serves as tour guide for some earthier delights involving stately gentlemen in nun drag, bearded chorines doing florid things, mock-Nazis sporting leather, bathhouse boys in towels and lusty lesbians on tricycles.

Significantly, there also is a bedroom love duet for skivvy-clad baritone and tenor. It turns out to be trite rather than touching.

None of this, one hastens to assert, is remotely shocking. In context, however, much of it looks self-consciously silly.

The dramatic problems could have been mitigated, even obliterated, by a probing, character-defining, psychologically sensitive score. No such luck. Wallace cranks out busy-music by the mile. Faceless busy-music. Loud busy-music. Busy-music that often resembles movie music.

When the action stops for production numbers, the composer resorts to show-biz cliches. When the tone turns serious, he churns out turgid platitudes--babbling accompaniments for vocal lines that seldom exceed nervous singsong. In passages demanding rapture or repose, the rhetoric suggests nothing so much as a hand-me-down Puccini vamping in quest of melodic inspiration.

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If there is any pathos here, it lies in the story, not in Wallace’s treatment of it. The knee-jerk references to Stravinsky are pathetic. The quotations from “Tosca”--intended, no doubt, to sound portentous--seem little but wan exercises in aesthetic name-dropping.

Troublesome, too, is the sudden intrusion of Milk’s own voice--excerpts from a recorded speech--at crisis time. Crass reality instantly turns art to artifice.

The orchestrations are dense. That may explain the singers’ appalling reliance on body microphones. The amorous Harvey has one taped to his naked rib cage. Mayor George Moscone, here a booming basso-profondo, hides a tiny mike in his hair. The purposes may be practical, but the recourse to electronic boosting remains a declaration of operatic ineptitude, if not dishonesty.

Christopher Keene, who has inherited the baton from Houston’s Ward Holmquist, conducted on Tuesday as if the musical sprawl really meant something. His dedication to the cause was laudable.

Christopher Alden, the genial iconoclast who has enlivened many an operatic adventure in Long Beach, staged the proceedings with relative restraint. He stylized the action neatly, even when laying on climactic gimmickry with a heavy hand. The New York City Opera forces enacted his charades rather clumsily, however, especially when it came to a Stonewall riot muddled in cautious slow motion.

The director made canny use of Paul Steinberg’s bleak surreal set--a raked stage flanked by two walls. One contained seven significant closet doors; another contained a huge window that accommodated such passing symbols as heaven, the moon, white blinds and a cutout portrait of Maria Callas, the casta diva of every opera queen’s dreams.

The large cast, mostly imported from Houston, was dominated by Robert Orth, wise, sensitive and wiry in the title role. Raymond Very sounded properly agonized and seemed, perhaps, a bit too sympathetic, as his nemesis Dan White, here an almost-heroic tenor. Bradley Williams conveyed appealing innocence as Milk’s idealistic lover, a higher, more lyrical tenor.

Juliana Gondek tripled deftly as an oddly brassy Dianne Feinstein, a pathetic-prophetic Jewish mother and a whimsical hooker. Gidon Saks made a good case for booming power as a German sadist, a teamster and, finally, Moscone. Ron Baker flexed both pectoral and baritonal muscles imposingly on behalf of Milk’s guardian angel.

Hardly anyone, apart from Orth and Saks, bothered to articulate the English text clearly. Perhaps careful diction was deemed a waste of effort, since supertitles flashed every line atop the proscenium.

The capacity audience--polite rather than ecstatic--seemed to enjoy reading the opera. When something funny loomed, the crowd laughed, of course, before the punch line could be uttered.

In “Harvey Milk,” the singers don’t have to project much tone because their sound is amplified. They don’t have to articulate very carefully because their words appear on a screen.

To this we’ve come. . . .