Final curtains

“I WANT to blow you all. Blow you all. A kiss,” trilled Sarah Joy Miller (pictured, in a pink confection), who played the title role in “Anna Nicole”, a New York City Opera production at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. The opera depicted the life of Anna Nicole Smith, a Playboy model who, at the age of 26, married a Texan oil billionaire of 89. She went on to become a reality-show diva and tabloid queen. The bawdy comic libretto (she ordered her plastic surgeon to “Supersize me”) gave way in the second half to a dark verismo. The final aria, during which she dies, was as wrenching as the death of Violetta, the consumptive courtesan-heroine of “La Traviata”. It is also a reminder of how she died in real life: with an audience watching.