Act II brings the opera’s themes into dramatic focus. In several episodes, the action stalls a tour of Dame Shirley’s modest cabin, for instance, fails to advance the plot in any discernable fashion. Mexican saloon workers Josefa and Ramón sing a delicate love duet. Miner Joe Cannon, whose girl back home has instructed him not to return until he’s struck it rich, falls for Ah Sing, a Chinese prostitute. Dame Shirley makes a comic arrival in a springless covered wagon driven by former slave Ned Peters. The first act opens in an antic disposition, as Clarence, a resident of the camp, extols the manly virtues of his fellow miners. In letters to her sister, she described a mining camp winter, supplying a wealth of information about the “wild and barbarous life" of the milieu. As the opera’s central character, Dame Shirley is a watchful narrator of the tragic turn taken by her adopted community, which moves from an atmosphere of rugged optimism to scenes of venality, xenophobia, environmental destruction, and shocking brutality. Dame Shirley), a doctor’s wife who traveled from her East Coast home to Northern California in the 1850s. Its primary source is “The Shirley Letters,” written by Louise Clappe (a.k.a. Set amid the tumult of the California Gold Rush, the work incorporates Latin American and Chinese poetry, writings by Mark Twain and Frederick Douglass, and lyrics from nineteenth-century miners’ songs. Co-commissioned with Dallas Opera and Dutch National Opera, Girls was given a ten-performance run in San Francisco it offers a richly imagined score, a libretto drawn from historical sources, and an affectingly staged production. The latest collaboration from composer John Adams and librettist-director Peter Sellars, the opera is a work steeped in California history that speaks to the politics of today. THE MOST EAGERLY ANTICIPATED EVENT of San Francisco Opera’s fall season was the world premiere of Girls of the Golden West on November 21-and the company’s opening night performance lived up to expectations. Elliot Madore as Ramón and J'Nai Bridges as Josefa Segovia