I entered into the opera with high expectations, and that was my first mistake. I thought that I would be thrilled, chilled, and enthralled in a soaring grandeur and majesty, and that was my second. This aggressively mediocre production of "The Turn of the Screw" positively dripped with false intellectual merit. It was no fault of the singers - Wu perfectly captured a childlike innocence as Miles, and the voices of the other leads were very strong. Instead, the mediocrity lay rooted in the visual projection of the set (lending to a cheap vibe) the costuming (the Governess looked like she'd rolled out of a Goodwill reject pile) and the utterly abysmal scoring (I would identify a particular song, but the music ran amok like a grade-school run-on sentence). One goes to the opera to be swept away, and since opera is a genre so reliant on form, this pseudo-intellectual "artsy" romp came off as gauche and confused. The most enthralling part of this so called "thriller" was the intermission.