Under the pen name Dame Shirley, she wrote a series of eloquent, richly detailed letters about the thoughtless mob rule, which she described with a clarity, calm and remarkable capacity to retain her sense of wonder. One, Louise Clappe, was a young doctor’s new wife. The few at the Gold Rush camps tended to be wives of important men, prostitutes, entertainers, Native Americans or Californios, the original Mexican settlers. You will pass encampments of homeless seemingly growing in direct proportion to the invasion of newly minted tech millionaires in San Francisco, where there is nothing close to parity for women trying to cash in on Silicon Valley gold. It doesn’t matter from which direction you approach the War Memorial Opera House. That alone makes “Girls” an opera for our time.
And there was no sense of, let alone regard for, the earth-shaking social implications that a sudden infusion of massive wealth would have on the state, the nation and ultimately the world. The California Gold Rush was a young man’s game of strike-it-rich.
There weren’t very many girls to choose from for John Adams’ new opera, “Girls of the Gold West,” which had its premiere here last week.
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