NEW YORK — Fifteen years after its Dallas premiere, Moby-Dick sailed onto the stage of the Metropolitan Opera on March 3 for the company’s reopening after the February hiatus. Composer Jake Heggie and librettist Gene Scheer’s adaptation of Herman Melville’s epic adventure novel retains the vigor and visual wonder of its first performances in Leonard Foglia’s inventive production.
Melville’s novel came out in 1851 at the peak of the American whaling boom. Until the 1859 discovery of oil in Pennsylvania, whaling provided oil for lighting and lubrication, among other in-demand products. It was a highly lucrative business, and its support industries fueled the economy of New England. Each trip was a high-risk speculative investment, like a modern IPO: With luck, a common sailor could make bank from a single successful voyage. But not every months-long outing paid off for the crew, if they even survived the dangerous venture.
Under the command of Captain Ahab, the whaleship Pequod passes up other whale sightings on the year-long journey, for the captain is obsessed with finding the vicious white whale that maimed him on his previous voyage. After long months of waiting to spot the white whale, the crew grows frustrated with the missed opportunities to earn their pay, while Ahab becomes increasingly obsessed with his vengeance mission. Just as the first mate finally persuades Ahab to return to Nantucket, the mighty creature appears, and Ahab commands its pursuit, with inevitable tragic results. Only Greenhorn — Ishmael in the novel — survives.
Given the book’s unfamiliar setting, length, and many digressions, it’s understandable that generations of American students have struggled with this piece of required reading. But it is essentially a tale of obsession, crackling with action and peopled with strong characters. Scheer and Heggie decided to convert the story from a first-person account of remembered events to a real-time scenario, while simplifying the plot. Contrasting musical numbers flow into one another, with vigorous choruses and colorful orchestral passages propelling the action and smaller ensembles developing character and relationships. The seamless, through-composed structure gives dramatic momentum to an essentially static scenario of waiting for the inevitable.
Foglia’s production supports the music’s efficient transitions with fluid set changes blending projections with physical set elements. As the overture begins softly, a few stars appear on the black drop curtain. The music swells, the stars multiply, and their mass rotates, and the lines of a star chart appear. The spinning constellations morph into the outline of a ship’s rigging, which grows larger and is suddenly replaced with real ropes and masts filling the stage behind the now-transparent scrim.
Queequeg’s quiet prayer while his fellow sailors are sleeping provides a moment of repose before the crew wakes and the day begins. Sails rise and lower, and seamen bustle energetically, climbing masts and hawling ropes. In just a few minutes, we have gone from the quiet of the night sky to blazing sun, with all hands on deck at full volume. Gavan Swift’s lighting and Elaine J. McCarthy’s projections show the sea in all its moods, converting stillness to constant action — essential for a plot that largely consists of marking time until the long-awaited and fatal encounter with Ahab’s nemesis.
Heggie is a favorite with many singers and knows how to show voices to their best effect while making texts intelligible. His musical language is largely tonal, and his orchestral writing is melodic and transparent enough to grasp at first hearing. From the beginning, a recurring four-note theme that hovers unresolved around a single pitch introduces a note of yearning; in it I heard a similar 4-note motif from Bernard Herrmann’s score for Hitchcock’s Vertigo, about a very different obsession.
Arias and duets would be at home on a Broadway stage; conversations overheard at intermission mentioned Sweeney Todd and Phantom of the Opera. Choruses have a vigor that reminded me of Britten’s monumental ensembles for Billy Budd (based on an unfinished work by Melville). While Scheer’s well-crafted text incorporates lines from the novel, it is plain-spoken and direct in putting across the characters’ thoughts and feelings. With spoken dialogue in place of some of the solo writing, it would work on a Broadway stage.
The cast, all male except for one pants role, was uniformly strong. Tenor Brandon Jovanovich, tall and scarfaced as the vengeful and tormented Ahab, sang heroically and looked intimidating, though at times I wanted more — more intensity, more volume, more anger. Greenhorn was sung by tenor Stephen Costello, who created the role in Dallas. Pure of voice and persuasive as the pensive neophyte alone in the world, he gave a characterization more vivid than any other operatic role I’ve seen him perform. The charismatic Ryan Speedo Green as Queequeg, the Polynesian harpooner, made the most of a role that reduced him to exotic wise man and warrior. His calm strength and smooth bass-baritone cemented his appeal as a friend to Greenhorn.
Making a last-minute house debut, baritone Thomas Glass jumped in for the ailing Peter Mattei as the pragmatic first mate, Starbuck. His youthful face belied both the maturity of his voice and his confidence onstage as the only person who has the courage to stand up to the increasingly disturbed Ahab while allowing himself to feel friendship with this dangerously troubled man.
Soprano Janai Brugger as Pip, the cabin boy, provided sparkling energy and a fresh, rich-sounding lyric soprano that cut through and balanced the ensembles. Malcolm MacKenzie as Stubb and William Burden as Flask, the second and third mates, sang and acted sturdily. The all-male chorus was especially busy as they climbed riggings, hoisted ropes, danced, or brawled, all while singing magnificently. Conductor Karen Kamensek maintained power and momentum while managing the sometimes abrupt shifts in energy.
“Call me Ishmael,” the first words of the novel, may be the most famous opening line in all of American literature. Yet they are not heard until the very end of the opera, when Greenhorn is discovered floating on Queequeg’s coffin after the wreck of the Pequod. After a series of questions, the sea captain who rescued him asks, “What is your name?” Greenhorn’s answer, sung to the four-note motif introduced at the beginning, suggests that this lost soul and sole survivor has finally found himself.
Later curtain calls unveiled some of the extraordinary stagecraft, notably the choristers suspended on loops in the wall that made them look like seamen in the rowboats projected vertically on the rear of the stage. Jovanovich took a final solo bow standing on his two feet, as if to taunt us with the secret of how the able-bodied tenor so convincingly emulated a peg-legged amputee for the entire show.
Moby-Dick continues through March 28. For info and tickets, go here.
