Klonghoffer "lackluster" in Premiere

This story was covered yesterday. According to the Times of Israel, the premiere was "lackluster.

But let’s back things up a bit. I was at the Metropolitan Opera’s Monday premiere of “The Death of Klinghoffer,” a work dating from 1991 about the 1985 hijacking of the Italian cruise liner Achille Lauro. The ship was taken by members of the Palestinian Liberation Front who subsequently murdered a wheelchair-bound New York Jewish passenger named Leon Klinghoffer.

Prior to the performance I attended a two-hour rally, a peaceful scrum in a tiny traffic triangle where Broadway meets Columbus Avenue at West 64th Street. A few hundred people were there, many carrying signs declaring that the opera was anti-Semitic propaganda. Most felt the show should be shut down. No one I spoke to had actually seen it, though as New York City-based protester Noah Cohen put it, “I have no need to go look in a mirror and see a distorted version of my own face.”
The problem with the work, whose detractors included former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani, former governor David Patterson and US Congressional representatives Carolyn Maloney and Peter King (a nice combination of Democrats and Republicans), seemed to stem from the fact that the opera does not portray the hijackers as mindless bloodthirsty monsters, but dares to give the men and their cause a degree of backstory.