An Opera Finds Pathos in the Milli Vanilli Saga The deconstructed, multiroom opera "Wow (Work in Progress) " at BRIC Arts in Brooklyn, about the late-"80s rise and fall of Milli Vanilli, isn't the first to wring classical tragedy from modern-day cultural calamity - the composer Mark-Anthony Turnage did it with pieces about Anna Nicole Smith and Jerry Springer - but it might be the strangest. The creative trio of Joe Diebes, Christian Hawkey and David Levine cast the story of the braided European pop duo, who fell from grace when it was revealed that they'd been lip-syncing all along, as a postmodern tragedy about two handsome naïfs devoured by the pop-culture machine. An elegant, sardonic narrator guides the audience from room to room while a pair of actors (sans tresses) abstractly perform the Milli Vanilli story, with help from the downtown choreographer Clarinda MacLow. Musicians and singers slice and dice Richard Wagner's "Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg" into a repetitive, Glassian score that is piped from a central performance space into the other rooms to represent the duo's distance from their own sound. And the cleverest production moment casts the viewers as participants in the inane art-gallery plot of the duo's 1989 music video for "Girl I'm Gonna Miss You." But in the end "Wow" suffers from the same limitations that plagued the operas about Smith and Springer. Not all pop-culture stories carry enough emotional weight to stand up to ironic semiotic revisionism. As symbolically charged blonds go, Anna Nicole Smith was no Marilyn Monroe, and the fall of Milli Vanilli was not exactly the fall of Michael Jackson. At the end of "Wow," after the audience is herded back into the main performance room, the singers perform the same line of text over and over, each time with fewer syllables, until finally a few !Kung-like clicks wane to nothing. The entire Milli Vanilli saga seemed to happen even faster.