"Cosmo, you're gonna die." ~ The Tempest encore @ OperaMall Millionplex

Okay I said posting from the brave new world, but perhaps that was overly optimistic. At least about the "new" part.  What is new is something I don't think I've ever seen on the stage of the Met: a production of an opera that exceeds the opera itself, not in terms of artistic merit, per se, but in terms of sheer presence. It's something like arranging a single daisy in a Ming vase.

I would say a rose.  One would want to say it was a rose. And don't get me wrong, the orchestration is absorbing. But there has been a certain amount of criticism about the libretto, and while I'm generally an easy A in matters such as these, um... When librettist Meredith Oakes defends the choice of rewriting the whole thing in rhyming couplets, she says it's because iambic pentameter is hard to sing. That may or may not be true, I can't say I've ever tried. But I will point out that Shakespeare's use of meter in this play is famously slap-dash, which leads one to suspect that the real purpose of reducing all to rhyming couplets was actually a way of giving singers something to grab hold of while confronting Adès' free-range vocal lines. And I suppose that's fine. To a point. If the adaptation actually does something interesting with the source material. Which this one kind of doesn't.

In this regard, Robert Lepage's treatment of the work is not unastute. The production, even on an HD screen where much is likely to be lost, was fun to look at. The whole notion of setting the opera in a 19th century La Scala ("absolute Milan" indeed), and the equation of Prospero surrendering his powers -- drowning his books, breaking his staff -- with an opera singer giving up his stage career is clever enough, if a bit on the obvious side. Not to say reductive.

And perhaps that's the problem, that, eye-candy though the production is, it's a conceit that highlights the work's shortcomings as an adaptation. Much has been made of this being a younger Prospero than Shakespeare's.  Every third thought isn't his grave but his retirement, and every second one the fact that his daughter has a boyfriend -- and not, as Ferdinand is in the play, one of his choosing (which kind of shoots the whole revenge plot in the foot, it seems to me).  Prospero's dilemma as a father facing Freudian rivalry is rendered in small gestures like Miranda having to deliberately disengage her hand from Dad's, and Prospero's mouthing Caliban's words as Caliban says them: "I watched her..." Call me old-fashioned, but, seriously, that's creepy.

But also perhaps inevitable. Because what they've made of what some call Shakespeare's valedictory address of a play is not a complex piece with several distinct but interlocking themes, not really, but a fantasy about the standard-issue problems of a middle-aged man. Sorry, Middle-Aged Man readers, but zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz... I can get that spiel for free without the complicated orchestration. Or a purple sprite who presents like Sandy Duncan on coke and helium.

And here's where timing is everything.  Earlier I pointed out that this has been a year of Tempests. It has also seen a continuing and increasing trend of women being cast in traditionally male roles in Shakespeare plays. So as much as Simon Keenlyside, in the HD's half-time interview, tries to sell the production's main theme of aging as a universal one, here's the problem: Helen Mirren and Olympia Dukakis.

Olympia Dukakis & cast of THE TEMPEST, Shakespeare & Co. Photo by Kevin Sprague. 

Changing Prospero to Prospera is another kind of adaptation -- not just like casting, say, Fiona Shaw as Richard II, a woman playing a man, but changing the gender of the character outright, and oh, what interesting things that does to this play. If Prospero's journey involves the raising and letting go of a child, Prospera's involves knowing a great deal more about that child's future than Prospero ever could. What that does, among other things, is move Miranda out of the category of ventriloquist's puppet and toward the realm of three dimensional character, because we have already met some iteration of her future. Not to mention how much it ups the ante on the words that come out of Caliban's mouth, and without the lip-synch, thanks. In short, messing with the gender opens up whole new dimensions in the work, and all they had to do was rewrite a bit of exposition and some pronouns. Beats the hell out of rhyming couplets.