Pick of the Week: Daron Hagen's Vera of Las Vegas is a gutsy, occasionally trashy cabaret opera, which details the fateful intersection of two on-the-lam IRA opertatives and a Las Vegas lap dancer who has a "little secret" of her own. Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Paul Muldoon supplied the libretto, chock-full of wry references to U2's Bono and The Crying Game. Oh, and did we mention that the title role is performed by the Juilliard-trained drag diva Shequida?

A Bevy of Eccentrics in a Dreaming Fenzy: The highly anticipated event was Thursday night's ''Vera of Las Vegas: A Nightmare Cabaret Opera in One Act,'' in its staged premiere. Mr. Muldoon, the librettist, won the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for poetry. And Mr. Hagen's wide-ranging explorations of musical styles would make him seem a natural for experimental opera. The work was vibrantly staged by Charles Maryan in the downstairs Thalia Theater, decked out as a cabaret with cocktail tables, spotlights and a jazzy orchestra in full view. Yet for all its theatrical flair, and for all the daring flourishes of Mr. Hagen's harmonically tart music and Mr. Muldoon's clever verse, ''Vera of Las Vegas'' is baffling and convoluted. The story centers on two friends from Northern Ireland living illegally in the Bronx: Taco Bell, who drives a cab, and Dumdum Devine, who tends bar. The opera opens somewhere in Northern Ireland, where Taco is being interrogated and beaten by two leather-clad thugs. He falls unconscious and suddenly we hear the swanky sounds of a nightclub band and six Andrews Sisters-like casino girls. In a program note Mr. Hagen likens his score to 'Four Saints in Three Acts,' the opera by Virgil Thomson with a text by Gertrude Stein, crossed with Bernstein's 'Age of Anxiety' symphony. In a long, revealing solo scene for Doll, when she speaks of her adopted home as a strangEley mystical place (''The thing I love about Las Vegas is the hoping more, not the having less,'' she sings), you hear echoes of Stein's nonsensically alluring poetry and Thomson's deceptivEley innocent music, with its churchlike harmonies, unruffled pace and intoned melodic lines. But ''Four Saints'' has a seamless musical flow and guileless textural resonance, whereas you hear the effort as Mr. Hagen blends brassy jazz, crunchy contemporary riffs, wordy recitatives, lyrical outpourings, choralelike choruses for the Catchalls and flashes of cabaret music into his fitful score. Still, you cannot deny the theatrical audacity of 'Vera of Las Vegas,' which elicited many cheers from the packed house. The leads were excellent: the lyric tenor Dillon McCartney as Taco, the hearty baritone Elem Eley as Dumdum, the husky-voice soprano Patricia Dell as Doll, and as Vera a theater performer, dancer and Juilliard-trained singer called Shequida, who, despite a loud and strident falsetto high range, was a powerful vocalist and sleek-figured presence. The six Miss Catchalls were impressive not just for their in-tune harmonizing but for their willingness to shimmy and pout in revealing costumes. This is not the kind of thing singers get trained to do in conservatories. But it's all in a day's work with experimental opera. .

An entertaining and provocative opera by Composer Daron Hagen and Librettist Paul Muldoon. The clever story mixes sleazy culture and big questions, while the contemporary music has many references to 20th century pop and stage music."

Hagen's opera equally captures all the smuttiness, desperation, and humanity of the characters with a quippy flair. The music is truly a canonical hybrid of opera and popular forms, with vocal writing that periodically swings and radiates a sultry, burlesque feel.

Six years after orchestral concert performances at the University of Nevada Opera Theatre were recorded, Daron Hagen's one-act Vera of Las Vegas received its premiere staging by Manhattan's Center for Contemporary Opera at Symphony Space, in the composer's own 'nightmare cabaret' version, backed by four musicians. The last of a two-day, four-performance run (June 27) attracted an unpretentiously hip, diverse crowd whose desire to be entertained was gratified.

The plot, an espionage nightmare set in Las Vegas, issues from the severely stressed brain of 'Taco' Bell, an IRA gunman enduring invasive interrogation in Northern Ireland in 1993: pursued by spies, he and a compatriot, Dumdum, tangle with IRS agent Doll Common, and her friend Vera, an African-American transvestite lap-dancer. Whether this is memory or fantasy is not resolved in Paul Muldoon's fascinating, witty but sometimes arcane, opaque libretto. Muldoon has a marvelous ear for scansion, but through no lapse of Hagen or the strong cast, the complicated verbal play does not always transmit intelligibly into song. One might do well to distribute the libretto to the audience beforehand, in eighteenth-century fashion; despite a surfeit of "user-friendly" pop references to U-2, McSorley's and Powerbooks (in 1993?), those seeking narrative clarity might remain puzzled. After Dumdum rambles on obsessively one too many times about the details of IRA slayings and internecine politics, one identifies with Taco's shout of 'Shut the hell up!' (This was not the fault of the seasoned Elem Eley, as Dumdum, though this capable baritone seemed facially and vocally attuned to filling larger spaces.)

Hagen's music wears its eclectic sources -- classical, jazz, pop, rock -- on its sleeve enjoyably enough for its cabaret format. Music director Robert Frankenberry (at the piano and clavinova) fronted an outstanding combo, including Jeff Carney (bass), Paul Garment (reeds) and percussionist Jeff Kraus, who got a real workout. Director Charles Maryan maximized the unorthodox, somewhat cramped playing area through ingenuity in props and variety and timing of movement. In the title role, Juilliard-trained drag diva Shequida took the stage (and Vera's sustained notes above the stave) with poise and confidence, riveting attention in Vera's autobiographical aria. A churning vibrato made Shequida sound like a higher-pitched Gail Gilmore. With his mellifluous "Irish" tenor, easy stage presence and clear, natural diction, Dillon McCartney (Taco) seemed a find for composers and directors alike. Patricia Dell radiated music-theater professionalism as Doll -- too much so, as her arch knowingness seemed at odds with the hard-bitten character's emotion-laden ballads. Six well-named Miss Catchalls served multiple functions in the show: stewardesses, lap- and pole-dancers, casino molls and the kind of "lite" Greek chorus Bernstein used in Trouble in Tahiti. Put effectively to work by choreographer Bruce Heath, looking duly sexy and furnishing great attitude, the six (Karie Brown, Nicole Cherniak Hyde, Karen Jolicoeur, Gilda Lyons, Alison Quinn McConekey and Tara Venditti) also brought great dexterity, fine harmonizing and consistent beauty of tone to some of Vera's best music.

Vera of Las Vegas is composer Daron Hagen's second operatic collaboration with Pulitzer-prize winning poet Paul Muldoon. The piece is both an homage to and critique of the eponymous squalid city's 'house always wins' zeitgeist. Its billing as a 'Nightmare Cabaret Opera in One Act' is something of a misnomer: it is not epic enough to be opera, not incisive or brutal enough to be cabaret, and not freakish and confusing enough to be a nightmare. Instead, it works out as a mostly-successful experiment and an intriguing but peculiar piece of operatic derring-do.

The labyrinthine plot centers around two Irishmen - Taco Bell and Dumdum Devine - who are stuck in Vegas for the night and pursued by a couple of shady characters. Doll Common, working for the INS but posing as a stewardess, offers Taco a free day in Vegas, escort included. The "lady" who shall service him, one Vera Allemagne, is actually (brace yourself for a Crying Game-ish twist) a man. Hilarity and confusion ensue as the opera travels with abandon from casinos to strip clubs to a wedding chapel as Dumdum and Taco undergo several important revelations, with sexuality and loyalty being, for both, more liquid than when they arrived. And, it turns out, the gentlemen have darker pasts than we first imagined. Vegas, in its seedy boulevard-of-broken-dreams way, has taken its toll on all concerned: one night there, and lives will never be the same.

The music gambols from style to style, if not effortlessly, at least without being precious or vague. Hagen always sounds native and confident, using scaled-down orchestration consisting of a piano, bass, drum kit and saxophones, giving the piece its night-club edge. He is a fluent, creative, inventive composer, one whose sparkle and wit shimmer throughout the piece. From the Bernstein-like brashness of the opening bits to Doll's slow pop-ballad aria to Vera's eleventh-hour-save torch song, Hagen (rather self-consciously) goes for broke. And his obvious affinity for Muldoon's wacky, all-over-the-map text, leads to a seamless marriage of words and music, even if the libretto, at times, is too poetically clever for its own good. Where Sondheim-like bitchy irony and urban loneliness could have communicated this story effectively, instead we get a poetic romp that is better on the page than the stage. Word-play on common Vegas terms (like 'strip' and 'bar') gets lost when sung, and the muddle happens when Muldoon starts to have too much fun with his concepts, thereby forgetting audience, plot, and characters. This is a shame, since the set-up is beguiling. And Hagen has little choice but to follow his librettist, which makes some bits overlong, like the parlando recitatives at the beginning, or Vera's lament towards the end. By the time all has been revealed, the audience has been so long forgotten that it is difficult to care about the characters.

Performances throughout were excellent, though one had to listen past the rough acoustics of the Thalia in order to tell. Thank you Mr. Nimoy for saving this space, but it is hardly one for music: voices and instruments alike sound towel-dampened, so to judge the performers is an almost impossible, or at least unfair, task. As the two roguish Irishmen, baritones Dillon McCartney and Elem Eley were both excellently cast, edgy and brash. Patricia Dell infused soulful subtlety into the role of Doll Common; her aria near the beginning was one of the evening's highpoints. But, in the end, the night belonged to the gorgeous uni-named Shequida as Vera, whose overt sexiness and creamy smooth mezzo timbre, which even cut through the wretched sonics of the hall, caused jaws to drop, for any number of reasons. She tore into her torch song with appropriate bitter-hued sultriness, at once vulnerable and impenetrable, and managed well the libretto's bizarre and rather cheap references (would a drag-queen lapdancer discuss Aschenbach and Abelard, especially while trying to be real?). Vera of Las Vegas is essentially musically sound and was well-performed; some tweaking of the libretto would strengthen it even further.

Paul Muldoon has written three opera libretti in collaboration with the prodigiously-talented American composer, Daron Hagen. The first of these was Shining Brow (Libretto: Faber, 1993; Vocal Score: E.C. Schirmer, 1995), based on the life of Frank Lloyd Wright, first performed in 1993 at the Madison Opera, Wisconsin. Shining Brow will be released by Arsis Audio in 2004. The second opera was Vera of Las Vegas, and the third was Bandanna (Libretto: Faber, 1999; Vocal Score: Carl Fischer, 2001). Very loosely based on Othello, and set in a small town on the US-Mexico border during the ominously named Day of the Dead, in fall 1968, Bandanna was first performed at the University of Texas Opera Theater in 1999.

Vera of Las Vegas was performed by the University of Nevada (Las Vegas) Opera Theater in March 1996, and will be performed again, in the 2003-'04 season, by the Center for Contemporary Opera, at the Nimoy Thalia Theater Space, New York City. Having to write this review, I thought it wouldn't do merely to look at the script printed by Gallery Press, without considering the musical context in which it grew. Admittedly, it is a poetic drama, worth discussing in its own right, but it has evolved out of a specific collaboration between poet and composer, is written with a musical setting in mind, and is best understood in that context.

The male protagonists of Vera of Las Vegas are two members of the Provisional IRA, 'Dumdum' Devine and 'Taco' Bell, whose conversation is filled with the kind of double enendres, puns and word play one has come to expect from characters in Muldoon's poems. (P.J. Kavanaugh meant it as a compliment when he described Muldoon as "a serious gamester.") Devine and Bell are en route for Los Angelos, to take part in Wheel of Fortune (not a common Provo destination, one imagines), stopping at Las Vegas on a layover. They have evidently made fools of themselves with the attractive air hostessess on the long flight from LaGuardia, one of whom -- Doll -- decides to introduce them to her Las Vegas stripper friend, the eponymous heroine of the piece, Vera. We have heard of Devine and Bell before, of course. Their illegal activities and disputed whereabouts were a matter of debate in Muldoon's play, Six Honest Serving Men (Gallery Books, 1995.) (That play featured a figure familiar to readers of Muldoon's poem "Anseo": none other than the little Provo "ward of court," Joe Ward). Along with one Dessie Gillespie, Devine and Bell had gone AWOL for two weeks, and, as one of the characters opined: "There'll be no light / shed on those three boys till some farmer turns / back into the field to plow the next score / and slices off one of their heads." In fact, two of them escaped such a fate, though we learn from Vera of Las Vegas that Devine murdered Gillespie, for undisclosed reasons; his memory of the murder provides one of several nightmarish flashback scenes in the opera.

Vera appears to be part of a covert INS sting to arrest the two men as illegal aliens, but it transpires that Trench and Trilby, the stereotypical MI5 men in trench coats, skulking in the background, are not only chasing Provos (they are seen interrogating Taco in a brief prelude to the opera), but are in pursuit of Vera as well, owing to a lawsuit she is refusing to drop, against a judge of her acquaintance: "a little sidebar / I had with a judge. A lot of side. A lot of bar." As one thing leads to another, Taco falls for Vera, who turns out to be a man, and marries her (er...him), in a perfunctory Vegas wedding. Dumdum gets paired off with Doll. The revelation of Vera's gender and Taco's seduction (much to Dumdum's disgust) is explicitly linked to a similar moment in The Crying Game, and Taco is allowed to have an unlikely epiphany, in which he sees the fundamental similarity between men and women: "What's the difference? A bit of loose skin...a fold of flesh...." The revelation of Vera's masculinity and Taco's latent homosexuality dramatizes one of the opera's central themes, that appearances are deceptive, and people, like places, are masked, malleable, and liable to change. As we are told in section XIII by the Chorus: 'We shall not sleep, we shall / all be bound on the ever-whirling wheel of / of change, the which all mortal things does sway.'

On one level, the opera (sub-titled 'A Nightmare Cabaret Opera' on Daron Hagen's website, but the subtitle does not appear in the Gallery Press edition) concerns a journey to the center of modern America ("center" is a word that gets bandied about a lot in Vera, and undermined). It is a place of materialism, greed, mechanical pleasures and phony appearances, an alienating labyrinth in which the Irish travelers become lost and transformed. To this extent, the book hints at allegiance with Hunter S. Thompson's nightmare novel, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, another phantasmagoric journey to the heart of darkness. Early on. in reply to Dumdum's remark 'the heart of America' Taco responds, 'Built of sand,' Yet, the opera announces its origins in the nightmare of Northern Ireland's Troubles by repeated references to Ulster place names, horrid flashbacks to obscure scenes of murder. The flashbacks revolve around the brutal killing of Dessie Gillespie, to which Taco confesses towards the close:

'I still hear the wheeps of curlews,
the buzz of bluebottles or clegs
and then a minute's silence, more or less,
before I shot him through his dicky heart.'

This antipastoral moment (those curlews and bluebottles have an ironic charge here) typifies how the Tragedy of Northern Ireland underlies the whole opera, bursting to the surface repeatedly. The word 'dicky' here highlights the callousness of the murderer'd language; it seems superfluous to say that Gillespie's heart was dicky. There is callousness, too, in the presentation of Gilbey's corpse, observed by Taco -- 'Someone had blown / his Adam's apple / clean away' and 'Gilbey's head looked like a ham on a hook.' The adam's apple recurs throughout the opera -- it is noted that Vera actually has one -- and is linked not only to postlapsarian predicaments but also to the Big Apple, from which the men have fled. Repetition of phrase and image plays a large part in Muldoon's technique here, sewing together the libretto in a pattern of echoes. As for the violence of the imagery, the unsettling vividness of the battered corpses, this underscores the moral vacuousness of paramilitary terror, as the libretto refuses the phony appearances offered by Las Vegas, its slot machines and casinos, bringing to the rarefied atmosphere of the operatic stage an unexpected scale of imagery that one might more readily expect in The Godfather or, indeed, The Crying Game. Muldoon writes opera, as he writes poems, on his own terms.

I was fortunate enough to get hold of a demonstration disc of a performance of Vera, which will be released by CRI in 2003. It is well worth hearing. The part of 'Dumdum' is performed by a steady baritone of considerable range, and Taco by a competent tenor, whose reedy urgency conveys the roller coaster of emotion experienced by this troubled character. However, the tenor has been listening to too many old John McCormack records, leading him to play the character not in a Belfast accent, but in a rather forced West of Ireland brogue; that's OK, he shouldn't sound like Van Morrison singing 'TB Sheets,' but it jars a little at the start. Doll's part is performed by a very striking soprano, who sings very well in the duet, but I particularly enjoyed the aria "The Thing I Love About Las Vegas" (VI). Vera's countertenor performs the soulful autobiographical aria, 'For I, Vera, am the Way' (XIV) with feeling. The female chorus does sterling work singing harmonies, by turns sassy, satiric, and contemplative, as The Attendants (II,IV), the Casino Girls (VIII), the Dancers (X). They perform as the Wedding Chapel Choir in XIII, and their lyrical hymn -- 'The ever-whirling wheel of change' -- elaborates memorably a key theme in Vera.

The music is an invigorating melange of traditional operatic styles, complemented by riffs from pop songs, torch song ballads, and Broadway tunes (sometimes accompanied by big brass, or off-key jazz trumpet), and informed by a kind of brash, modernist dissonance, at times reminiscent of the blousy impertinence of the great Weill/Brecht songs of Threepenny Opera. Indeed, the Weill/Brecht relationship comes to mind as readily as the great poetic collaborations of W.H. Auden and Benjamin Britten, even though both Auden and Britten have appeared as characters in Muldoon's poetry, and the poet seems likely to have taken an interest in them as writers of opera. The inclusiveness and eclecticism of the music, it should be said, does not make the opera disintegrate into fragments -- it is not a mess of allusions -- since the thing is sustained by a firm musical narrative, under whose control there is scope for radical variations. And the postmodern (if you will) style of mixing suits the Muldoon script, comprehending as it does traditions of high and popular culture, bringing into the great tradition of the aria the seedy, feverish world of political murder, Hollywood movies (The Crying Game, School Daze), the lyricism of Sondheim, and the sweaty passions of U2: 'Remember Bono / and the Edge in Las Vegas?' But what about feeling? Is it possible that the willful embrace of hybrid styles, no matter how brilliant or perhaps because so brilliant, can render a story vacant, can ignore or crimp the vein of feeling that otherwise might be tapped? I think the answer is that Hagen's musical score deepens the emotional energy of the characters, bringing out their obsessive feelings of guilt, confusion, alienation, self-hatred, anger, and indeed affection that are implicit there. It is an emotional piece of music, and altogether rather powerful.

Remember the old bibliographic chestnut, 'If the Mona Lisa is in the Louvre, where is Hamlet?' Vera of Las Vegas is the Muldoon libretto, published by Gallery, but it is also the recording; it's also the sum of its performances. Admittedly, the libretto is different from the operatic text (understood here as a musical performance), and each of these texts has its peculiar strengths, but for the full effect, witness a performance.