For the most part, spirited stage action sufficiently compensated for technical shortcomings during this initial farewell to one of the Met's most popular productions, scheduled to be retired after this season.
(The Hindu text has thematic resonance to the story, of course, but its relationship to the stage action also allows for moment-to-moment ambiguity).
Mr. Stein said he had been working on the production over the previous year, completing, with his collaborators, complicated sets for the whole opera, several choreographed sections, more than 600 costumes and his ideas for stage action.
Finally, the jazz score, by Terry Davies, is wonderful: sometimes ruminative and smoky in that sixties way, but elsewhere trumpetingly dramatic and thus a firm support for the stage action.
Directors, designers and dramatists were all influenced by Brecht's idea of an epic theatre in which narrative replaces plot, the spectator is turned into an observer rather than someone implicated in the stage action, and each scene exists for itself alone.
He was also asked about a play he had directed for Stage for Action, a leftist theater group.
Odets's Waiting for Lefty (1935), his first great success, used both auditorium and stage for action and was an effective plea for labour unionism; Awake and Sing (1935) is a naturalistic family drama; and Golden Boy (1937; filmed 1939) concerns an Italian youth who rejects his artistic potential to become a boxer.
It would set the stage for action in January on a $1 trillion-plus spending bill for the budget year that began in October.
The increased sensitivity of SR/CR mice to MethA and LL/2 suggested that a failure might have occurred at one or more of the three required stages of leukocyte action for the anticancer response.
But this year's debate could set the stage for action next session.
