Photo credit: Ken Howard, AP Photo
As the curtain rose on the revival of John Dexter’s
production of Francis Poulenc’s Dialogues
des Carmélites at the Metropolitan Opera this week, a group of 13 nuns laid
prostrate on a slab of stone flooring in the shape of a cross. The cloaked
figures were immobile through the deafening silence, rising only as the
orchestral prelude begins. The image was immediately evocative and ultimately foreshadows
the opera’s grisly end.
Unfortunately, the production only went downhill from there.
Originally launched in 1977, John Dexter’s minimalist set
design was purposefully created in stark contrast to the gilded and overly ornate Franco Zeffirelli
productions that had risen to great fame at the Met, emblematic for their
cinematic set pieces and fussy costume designs. And while its historical
context should be taken into perspective, Dexter’s vision hasn’t held the test
of time, reading as cold, hollow, and plainly uninteresting by today’s
standards.
With the cross-shaped flooring in place for the entire
production, the audience moves through an aristocratic manor, as well as a
convent’s parlor, workroom, and chapel by bringing shoddy set pieces up and
down the stage. While many theatrical productions thrive on letting the
audience put the final pieces together in their own mind’s eye, a brown cross
painted on what looks to be a plywood backing hardly makes for a chapel
interior.
Today’s audiences at the Met have become accustomed to modern spectacle,
both tasteful (Bartlett Sher’s The
Enchanted Island, Robert Lepage’s Le
Damnation du Faust) and tacky (Robert Lepage’s Ring cycle), and while Dialogues
was revived for only a three-performance run, its overall look was closer
to a collegiate production than the center of the operatic world.
Saving the audience from a miserable three hours was the
brilliant cast assembled, as well as Mostly Mozart’s music director, Louis
Langrée, leading the orchestra in a colorful reading of the work. Isabel
Leonard made for a well-conceived Blanche, with her bell-like soprano
delivering the naiveté of the character as she seeks refuge from the rebel
forces in the Carmelite convent, only to be driven away by the rebel’s anti-religious
decrees. David Pittsinger was confident as Blanche’s brother, the Chevalier,
whose sense of drama and vocal blend with Leonard were captivating during their
duet in the second act, as he plead with Blanche to leave the convent before
its fall to the revolutionary forces.
However, it was Felicity Palmer’s performance as the ailing
Prioress that was the emotional core of the opera—a crazed race to the death
that had Palmer writhing in pain as she questioned her religion and relayed
brutal feelings of abandonment by her God.
The opera’s final scene—perhaps the most upsetting ending in
all of opera—was the only moment where the strength of the cast was supported
by the set design in any way. Amidst the crowd of rebels, the nuns were led one
by one to the guillotine after taking a vow of martyrdom, and each singer’s
procession up the spine of the cross-shaped flooring was chilling.
The
lush and Impressionistic qualities of Poulenc’s score merit a production that
matches those qualities throughout, however. The action of the final scene can stand on its own in terms
of visceral emotional power, but the other two and a half hours should have its
plot similarly complemented by the onstage elements. Given the fact that Dialogues was one of only two 20th-century
opera programmed at the Met this season, it certainly shouldn’t have been made
to look like an ancient relic far beyond its years.