(no subject)

freeradical42 and I saw Thomas Ades's "The Tempest" last night at the Met. Well, we saw part of it. I can't remember the last time I bailed on a show before it was over, but we did last night. freeradical42 was getting angrier and angrier and I wasn't interested enough in the show to want to make him endure the third act.

For some reason, they decided to play Prospero completely straight, without any of the asides and winks to the audience that make him such an interesting character. This Prospero doesn't play-act to get what he wants. For example, when Miranda meets Ferdinand and falls in love, Prospero is genuinely enraged that she tries to disrupt his vengeance. And when they go off together as lovers, Prospero is forced to concede that Miranda and Ferdinand's true love has trumped his bitterness- it is outside his control. ("Miranda/ I've lost her/ I cannot rule their minds/ My child has conquered me/ A stronger power than mine/ Has set the young man free".) This made a mockery of the original, where Prospero has total control of the situation and is toying with Miranda because he wants her to find love on her own, but also as her father wants to be the one who gives her everything. Instead, it gets reduced to a trite operatic love story where the lovers need to overcome the obstacle of their parents' hatred, which is not why we find Prospero interesting. In Shakespeare's The Tempest, Prospero is Shakespeare, creating a world with his words and being transformed in the process. In Ades's version, he is reduced to the role of magician, casting spells and hoping that they work the way he wants them to. It was disappointing; moreover it was boring.

In the opera's only stab at interesting metatheatrics, they recreated a version of La Scala inside the Met stage, suggesting that this Duke of Milan was also a director or actor using the magic of theatercraft to summon the audience to the Island. In the opening tempest scene, Ariel dances above the water while hanging from a chandelier. But though I found this idea fascinating, the execution wasn't. Aside from the chandelier, there were few interesting visual cues building off this theme. The result actually made the set look kind of shabby, in that it interfered with suspension of disbelief, but without any real payoff. The only other moment that I liked in those terms was Caliban clambering out of the prompter's box that served as his cave.

I could probably say more, but I don't feel like it. Maybe the third act saved it, but we read the synopsis and it seemed to preserve the thin and problematic characterizations that most turned us against the opera.