 Donal Henahan, writing in the "New York Times", called the Houston Grand Opera world premiere of the work "worth a few giggles but hardly a strong candidate for the standard repertory" and "visually striking but coy and insubstantial".James Wierzbicki for the "St. Louis Post-Dispatch" described Adams's score as the weak point in an otherwise well-staged performance, noting the music as "inappropriately placid", "cliché-ridden in the abstract" and "[trafficked] heavily in Adams's worn-out Minimalist clichés".With time, however, the opera has come to be revered as a great and influential production.