Wonders Are Many tells the story of making a grand opera about the atomic bomb. This behind-the-scenes documentary follows composer John Adams and director Peter Sellars over the course of a year as they work to forge the tale of J. Robert Oppenheimer into a music drama like no other: the strange and beautiful Doctor Atomic. As Sellars and Adams struggle to make high art from the most savage weapon in history, the film explores the spectacular and unnerving 60 year history of nuclear weapons. It shows the real events behind the drama on stage, and the unintended consequences of actions (and inactions) of men working on the first nuclear device.
Weaving together the intense and sometimes hilarious process of making an opera with striking newly declassified historical film of Robert Oppenheimer, the Manhattan Project and nuclear testing, Wonders Are Many focuses on the 48 hours leading up to the Trinity atomic test in July of 1945.
The film unfolds in the deserts of Nevada and New Mexico, and in the back stage frenzy at the San Francisco Opera. At the center of a swirling vortex of singers, scenery, physicists, stagehands and bombs stand the indomitable Sellars and Adams.
This film is the culmination of work that director Jon Else began in 1979 with Day After Trinity, his biographical film of J. Robert Oppenheimer, and in 2000 with Sing Faster: The Stagehands Ring Cycle.
