TV REVIEWS : ‘EINSTEIN ON BEACH’

Anyone credulous enough to accept “Einstein on the Beach: The Changing Image of Opera” as merely a PBS documentary about the 1984 Brooklyn revival of a celebrated postmodern music/theatre piece is ready to be sold the Brooklyn Bridge as well.

Despite its newsy collage of rehearsal and interview footage, this hourlong Mark Obenhaus video project (tonight at 8 on Channel 24, and at 9 on Channels 28 and 15) is essentially a work of sanctimonious puffery.

Not only do we learn that Philip Glass and Robert Wilson’s 4 1/2-hour creation represents the music, dance and theater of our time--period, no dissent allowed--we’re told that not merely opera but the act of perception itself changed forever when the work received its premiere in 1976. Heady stuff.

Alas, for those unenlightened geezers cursed with the fate of missing every production of “Einstein,” such epochal claims are scarcely supported by the tantalizing but often confusing image-snippets that Obenhaus assembles.

To begin with, even large-screen TV can only hint at the ambitious manipulations of theatrical scale that Wilson speaks about so compellingly. Moreover, the incantory spell of Glass’ incremental musical methodology is shattered here by restless, diversionary editing.

The interviews do yield major insights about the genesis and artistic priorities of “Einstein”-- concepts of rhythmic structure, repetition and permutation; experiments in heightened emphasis, emotional detachment and poetic association. But the telecast also lovingly preserves a lot of state-of-the-art doublespeak. (Glass: “It doesn’t matter what it means as long as it’s meaningful.”)

PBS might have served “Einstein” far better with a full-length performance telecast rather than overlaying inconclusive excerpts with so much extravagant hype.