We saw The Tempest at the Met last week and it left me with many questions.  Perhaps someone can answer at least a few of them.

I know it was a contemporary opera, written in the last decade, but it left me not only with questions but also a general feeling of unease like I was missing something.  But first, the good stuff.  The visuals and costumes were beautiful.  The sprite, Ariel, had a lovely sparkly costume that at times caught the light just right and sparkled all over the stage and into the audience.  I also liked Caliban’s dirty feathered codpiece.  It went well with the whole cenobite birdman motif they had going for him, and it was great to use my opera glasses on it and see all the details.  The whole performance was very Cirque de Soleil.  I got that sense from the very beginning watching Ariel slink up and down the chandelier that later turned into a spinning ship.  I was pleased to see this was an accurate perception of mine as the director of The Tempest, Robert Lepage, has actually worked in Cirque de Soleil. 

 It was also refreshing to see singers who could actually move and dance onstage.  Which led me to my first distracting question in the show.  Was Ariel dancing andsinging herself?   The opening with her spinning on the chandelier above the blue silk ship-destroying tempest was surely a dancer.  But Ariel moved like a dancer during many of her singing sequences.  (Hard to call them arias or duets, I’m not sure what to call them in The Tempest).  And when Ariel and the aforementioned chandelier transformed into the Harpy, was the singer actually singing AS the Harpy?  Or was it the dancer?  Or were they the same person?

I did like Ariel’s shrieking singing.  Seemed very appropriate for an unhappy and imprisoned fairy/sprite.   It was harrowing and effective although a bit nerve grating. 

I also greatly enjoyed the stage within the stage motif of the production.  As Prospero watched the action unfold from just offstage, and later when the action shifted to backstage and finally a side cutaway of the entire theatre you felt that Prospero was a god watching his castaways in his created world trying to make sense of what he had done.  Showing the bones of the Met stage also emphasized the fact that this was a production, a false world that could be stripped away while the characters remained oblivious and stuck in their fantasy world.  It didn’t allow us to suspend disbelief in some ways, and yet in others made one question just what was real.  The performers stepped out of being on a stage and now were standing in a barebones theatre, full of ladders, props, and lights, yet didn’t notice and were still searching about for food and a way get off the island.  At both the beginning and the end of the performance the background of the stage was an opera theater complete with red curtain and balconies.  At first I thought it was a nod to Shakespeare and the fact that this would ordinarily be performed as a play in an ampitheatre that would surround all the players.  Later, though, I wondered if in some way the performance reflected the audience in that the lost Neapolitans and Milanese were searching for food, a way home and trying to make sense of their fate as all of us in the audience grapple with our own struggle to make sense of our world while perhaps ignoring the bigger picture.  Or maybe I was just in too contemplative a mood that night. 

 

The supertitles projected on the stage were very effective and strangely I found them to be less distracting than constantly shifting my gaze to the seat in front of me.  I actually turned the seat back supertitles off.  A first for me. 

The conductor also had very modern, almost hipster, attire.  He wore no tie, just a v-necked white shirt, which made him look like he was wearing a black dinner jacket and a white wife beater t-shirt.  A very clean and pressed wife beater t-shirt, but a wife beater nonetheless.   Although the audience didn’t seem to mind as he and his t-shirt were very well received. 

As cold season progresses, the Met audience gets progressively louder with coughing and sniffling.  I heard several sneezes that reverberated throughout the house to the point of nearly drowning out the singing.   If anyone ever writes a modern experimental opera sung through sneezing, the met will only have to look to its audience to cast the principles.  Note to self: bring hand sanitizer and cough drops for my fellow operagoers at the next show.

Also, I thought it was illegal to take pictures in the met.   People of course would sneak photos here and there but at the Tempest it seemed like hundreds of audience members were taking photos with their phones constantly. 

And have there always been freezing cold drafts in the Met?  I haven’t experienced them before.  But it several times felt as if a large cargo door has been opened backstage as wind ripped through the theatre.  Maybe there was. 

I’m sad to say I don’t think I got the discordant music.  In fact, Simon Keenlyside as Prospero was the only singing that made any sense to my ear.   And as stunning as the visuals were, I couldn’t help but thinking without them the opera might just be a flop.  But perhaps my ear needs to acclimate to the more discordant sound of modern opera.   We shall see.