WHY IS IT that when Americans go to the opera they look like they are at death's door? Perhaps it is the power of this music from long-dead times that casts a pallor of thinning hair and pale complexions on opera goers.

Perhaps it is the high proportion of walking corpses, dressed like extras from Sunset Boulevard, that makes everyone else in the audience look ill, too. The buckets o' blood spilled during a typical opera must be a contributing factor. And I've heard it said that opera is a slow-acting poison to red-blooded Americans. Whatever the reason, to visit the opera is to see an audience and an art form on its last legs.

Handel's Julius Caesar

Directed by Peter Sellars

At the Boston Opera House

February 19 and 22

It's this musty, dusty atmosphere of doom that director Peter Sellars '80 is trying to drive away with his production of Handel's Julius Caesar. Updated, polished, and stocked chock full of yucks, in Sellar's hands this baroque warhorse becomes a close cousin of a Gilbert & Sullivan operetta. Or two or three or four operettas. This production is four hours long. Granted, Handel wrote music as God meant music to be, but the theory that "Excess is best" holds only for sex and money.

The length of the production takes it toll on both the audience and the cast; by Act III, countertenor Jeffrey Gall (Julius) was cracking, and soprano Mary Westbrook-Geha (Cornelia) looked like she would have been grateful for a throat lozenge. A fifth of the audience was missing, too. The ridiculous length of this show trips up many of Sellar's interesting staging and acting ideas; the cast is so intent on remembering their lines, hitting the notes, and getting the blocking right that they can only make a gesture at acting.

Soprano Susan Larson, as the Naughty Nymphet of the Nile, carries off her dramatic duties with the most distinction, particularly when you consider the tough role, the skimpy costumes, and fact that Sellars makes Larson crawl on the ground blindfolded--still singing, mind you--for the first half of Act III. Her sex-kitten seduction of Caesar--complete with all-girl band and aerial entry--would have won her a juicy part in the Gold Diggers of 1933.

IN HIS program notes, Sellars announces right off the bat that he is bringing as light a touch as possible to what is ostensibly some serious dramatic business: Caesar arrives in Egypt and is seduced by the lips and legs of Cleopatra, who wants his aid in deposing her brother Ptolemy, the king of Egypt. The typically non-historical subplot stars Cornelia and her son Sestro, who are out for revenge after Ptolemy slays paterfamilias Pompey as a gift to Caesar and an excuse to put the moves on Cornelia himself.

Those with personalities just this side of the grave will cough, teeter, then collapse at the indignities Sellars has wrought upon the story. But all of Handel's operas are dramatic dogs anyway--there is nothing a director could do to the script to make the spectacle any less unbelievable. The juxtaposition of Handel's mostly sunny score and modern theatrical hijinks is potentially as worthy as any other approach.

Sellars obeys that old saw among directors pressed to be innovative: "When in doubt, update." Caesar is now the President of the US, Ptolemy is young Khaddaffi clone, the stage is a partially completed Hotel Cairo (the orchestra pit doubles as a swimming pool), and references to oil politics, game shows, and Navy musicals are bandied about with anachronistic glee.

Most of Sellar's staging ideas are as clever and witty as one would expect from this incorrigibly bratty director. Perhaps the best scene is a long aria in which Caesar announces how he will kick much Egyptian butt in an upcoming battle while his bodyguard gets chased around the stage by Egyptian commandos.

Far too many of the scenes are marred, however, by lackadaisical execution by the spent actors. And a few of the scenes are downright inexplicable. During one interminable aria, Sesto wrestles with a rubber snake, ties himself up with a garden hose, then connects the end of the hose to his arm. The program declares that Sesto is singing that, "The offended serpent never rests until its venom is spilled into the blood of the offender." Rubber hose, rubber snake, poison...nope, it's too subtle, I just don't get it.

What I did get was some of the finer music to be heard in Boston in awhile. Conductor Craig Smith prefers a richer, warmer Handel than my original-instrument tuned ears are accustomed to, but the quality was impeccable. Had Sellars and Smith done a little judicious paring on the score, my ears would have left totally elated instead of mildly exhausted.

The hipster approach will never attain the ultimate level of musical and dramatic rapture that is the supposed province of opera. But the Absolute Beauty or Bust approach is not always the best, particularly when dealing with the imperfections of baroque opera. Why shoot for the heavens, perhaps to crash and burn, when you can get a nice modern chalet on Mt. Everest?