By Allan Ulrich [Financial Times, 13 June 2006]

The unenviable task of producing an opera in which the music approaches the expendable has fallen to the Los Angeles Opera. But Elliot Goldenthal and Julie Taymor’s version of John Gardner’s 1971 cult novel has set a standard in a city where spectacular trappings are sometimes confused with profundity. Whatever virtues elude this dramatisation of the Old English Beowulf epic, recounted from the monster’s point of view, sheer theatrical legerdemain is not among them.