Some light reading this week: Jess Bravin of the Wall Street Journal finds Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg taking in an opera. Justice Ginsburg is an apparently frequent opera-goer, but in this instance, she’s both observer and subject:
Saturday night’s world premiere of ‘Scalia/Ginsburg,’ a comic opera putting the jurists through the paces of a supernatural crucible, had a particularly knowledgeable patron in the audience: Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who had a front-row seat in the Castleton Festival’s main performance tent.
‘I thought it was terrific,’ Justice Ginsburg said in an interview in Castleton, Va., offering a view not universally held by critics.
Bad reviews aside, the production has been kept impressively up-to-date:
[Creator Derrick] Wang, who wrote for the Hasty Pudding Theatricals while an undergraduate at Harvard, has loaded the piece with musical jokes and the libretto with clever passages from the characters’ legal opinions and public remarks. With a torrent of new opinions issued last month, he quickly updated the libretto to include the latest Scalia barbs, such as his reference to Chief Justice John Roberts’s opinion upholding nationwide insurance subsidies under the Affordable Care Act as ‘pure applesauce.’
Justice Ginsburg, to her credit, seems not to mind being less quotable than her counterpart in the opera:
Although there were no new Ginsburg lyrics, the justice took no offense.
‘I don’t have lines like ‘argle-bargle’ and ‘applesauce,” she said.