Even before the curtain rose on opening night of the Metropolitan Opera’s production of John Adams’ El Niño, it was clear that this was to be a different sort of night in the esteemed room. The curtain, in fact, was more of a scrim, bright green with an illustration of a dark-skinned girl at center. She looked to be a child, her back turned, one hand gently touching the leaves of a tree.
When El Niño premiered at the Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris in 2000, it was a different kind of Bible story as well. Adams and director Peter Sellars assembled a mélange retelling of the birth of Christ from The New Testament and other historical Christian texts as well as passages by 20th-century Latin American poets.
The oratorio is fully staged in the new production by Lileana Blain-Cruz, her first time directing at the Met, and given a crisp reading by conductor Marin Alsop, also in her Met debut. The three principal singers – Julia Bullock and Davóne Tines, making their first appearances at the Met, and J’Nai Bridges – were uniformly wonderful. In a production this good, with performances this strong, it seems absurd to say that the sets stole the show but Adam Rigg’s tableaux (another Met debut) were striking again and again.
The stage design is like a storybook, charming in its artifice. The scrim rose to reveal the chorus facing forward, palms outstretched, repeating “King” in song. Three figures rose from the crowd, floating upward as a neon piece – yellow scribbled circles and what look to be tree branches in fuchsia – descended, meeting them midair and becoming halos and wings in a magical diorama. The set could also grow foreboding, with dark clouds swirling overhead. There were always new things to discover: a guitar and, perhaps, a melodica in the orchestra; large, floating puppets that weren’t quite creatures or flowers but occasionally emerged as angels or dragons.
The opera itself is oddly assembled, more experiential than throughline narrative, even if (or because) the story itself is one of the best known in human history. The angels in the opening scene are a trio of countertenors who function as a small Greek chorus, advancing the narrative. Characters are sometimes they’re own narrators, switching to third person to describe their scenes. Bridges and Bullock double the role of Mary, sometimes together. It’s impressionistic, like a painting with multiple scenes in a single frame.
It’s also, at times, surprisingly real, as when Joseph quite reasonably suspects Mary became pregnant with another man. Tines’s projected tension filled the hall. Later, the setting (although not the storyline) switched to Mexico City, 1968, following the military firing on student protestors. That aria, “Woe unto them that call evil good”, and Tines’s performance of it, were the musical highlights of the night.
The Met is to be commended for presenting such a fresh look at what was already a fresh conception two decades ago, but Bullock deserves to be recognized for getting it there. She appeared in Adams’ Girls of the Golden West and Doctor Atomic, and has championed El Niño, presenting a chamber orchestra arrangement at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art and St John the Divine, and touring it with the American Modern Opera Company. This staging is a positive reflection on the Met Opera’s dramatically new direction. If there was a complaint to be made, it would be that the production was too whimsical, that it lacked austerity. But that’s not a complaint that will find lodging in this text.
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