People call critics all sorts of names for telling other people what to think after the fact.
No critic can actually tell anyone with half a brain what to think, only what he himself thinks. What I'm going to do here, this ultimate act of arrogance, as it were, is to tell you what to do before the fact, i.e., what you should attend in the wide world of San Diego arts during the 1997 winter season. It's an all-new production being built here by SDO's own scene shops. Aside from the fact that the entire production promises to be stunning, there is the matter of the plot. The opera libretto brings before the scrutiny of the American general public for the first time in perhaps 400 years the story of the Jews in Mexico and of the 16th-century Mexican Inquisition, every bit as cruel and implacable as its parent organization in Spain.