Masatomo Oto's costumes for TEA: A Mirror of SoulMostly good, except for sometimes OK. There’s a sword fight, drums made out of water, and a beautiful woman who sings upside-down. With assets like that, what could possibly go wrong with Tea: A Mirror of Soul, the Tan Dun opera which made its American premiere at the Santa Fe Opera for the 2008 season?

Actually, that turns out to be a shortlist of what, on a good night, goes right with the loose-leafed debacle. Tan Dun is an extraordinary, if saccharine, composer and Lawrence Renes conducts with youthful, post-pop, karate chop, urgency that conjures and jolts monstrously perfect notes from the orchestra, in a photo-finish stride with the otherworldly and remarkable staging, but it all falls to pieces when the libretto walks through the door and, bitter with its own mediocrity, murders everything in its path.

Dun claims to have been aiming for a kind of cosmic synergy of “song, words and fable,” but those are precisely the elements that the performance could have done without. Not only is the plot of the libretto tiresome and self-consciously humorless, but its oft-lauded poetry is overt and clumsy and suffers from a big, conspicuous irony-shaped hole. Its depressing translation into English is as startling to the ear as waking in the night to smoke, fire and the screams of your family.

In theory, several Chinese and Japanese traditional poetic and theatrical practices were melded to create the vocal styles through which the characters bring voice to the fable, itself a glamorized, incestuous and pretentious rendition of the classic “love triangle.” But, just as blending too many crisp and elegant colors together creates an uninspiring and light-sucking brown, such elements conspire to rid the players of all vocal inspiration. The sole source of impressive singing power (at least outside of the orchestra pit) is Roger Honeywell, as The Prince. But, in a turn of events more suited to a cinematic sequel to the X-Men, and in perhaps one of the few moments of irony onstage, Honeywell uses his powerful tenor for evil, rather than for the good of mankind. His piercing showmanship was the loudest and most cringe-inducing creature that confronted the audience, outside of his own costume, which made him look like the closeted, homo-not-so-erotic, lesser villain from a straight-to-video superhero franchise, based on the leaner days of creative energy in comic book history.

In addition to Honeywell’s costume, disturbing enough to provoke an urgent pelting with bottles, cracker boxes and other moop at an event as outlandish as Burning Man, the outfits of the character known as the Tea Ritualist, deserve an award in the category of Best Stupefying Assault on the Senses. She begins the night as a kind of Shirley Maclaine and Stevie Nicks mash-up and devolves into the costuming that Bette Midler would wear if she were going to get dressed-up and start eating the skulls of every stoned hippy girl that ever passed out at a Grateful Dead show. Eerily, the remaining costumes were quite expertly conceived and executed, with a special nod for The Prince’s fat-headed henchmen.

It’s a shame that the production is not entirely despicable, which would make it easier to hate the endeavor from head to toe. But Dun’s prescribed used of onstage, conducted elements—from his signature water drums, to torn paper, knocking stones, and slugging out fresh riffs with drumsticks and lanky banners—was pure genius and a panty-dropping cocktail of visual and aural pleasure, all swizzle-sticked into perfection. If I could have left the opera performers bound and gagged in the basement while Renes bravely went forward with conducting the score, and the score alone, I might have left Tea as a happy man. But wouldn’t you know, when I arrived for the traditional pre-event tailgate, it turned out that I’d put my stupid picnic basket where I normally keep my rope.