By STEVE SMITH [NY Times, 16 September 2008]

Depicting the unimaginable on a theater stage is a daunting prospect. In the original production of the opera “Doctor Atomic,” the director Peter Sellars and the composer John Adams represented the detonation of the first nuclear bomb with an ominous countdown, a flash of light and a profound silence. For some viewers this solution was a striking evocation of an event literally too overwhelming for the human mind to process. Others found it a disappointing cop-out.