WSJ: Awakenings “A Sensitive Adaptation… [Whose] Elegiac, Autumnal Score Treads Delicately In These Stories Of Unrealized Possibility”
Opera Theatre of Saint Louis returned to full programming this spring for the first time since the outbreak of Covid-19 with a pair of new works originally intended for its seasons in 2020 and 2021, which were, respectively, cancelled and abridged.
Tobias Picker’s “Awakenings” is a sensitive adaptation of the eminent neurologist Oliver Sacks’s 1973 book about a group of institutionalized patients who, stricken during the 1920s with encephalitis lethargica (sleeping sickness), had been locked into mostly speechless, motionless lives for decades. In 1969, using L-dopa, then newly shown to be effective in the treatment of Parkinson’s disease, Sacks “awakened” these patients, who had Parkinsonian symptoms, to near-normal functioning. Sadly, the drug’s effects were transitory and fraught with side effects, and the patients returned to their earlier states.