NEW YORK — When the failing widower Diego Rivera visits Frida Kahlo’s tomb to pray for one last day with her on earth, Catrina, the trickster guardian of the underworld, makes it happen. That is the premise, and most of the action, of Gabriela Lena Frank’s 2022 opera El Ultimo Sueño de Frida y Diego (The Final Dream of Frida and Diego), which is receiving its first Metropolitan Opera production as staged by Deborah Colker. Despite the sumptuous staging, lush and vivid score, and strong performances, the opera never quite fulfills the promise of catharsis and resolution. Still, most of the crowd on opening night May 14 left the theater bedazzled.
Frank’s opera, her first, had its premiere in San Diego. It is the fourth Spanish-language opera performed at the Met in recent years after nearly a century without any Spanish repertoire (counting John Adams’ El Niño, which uses both English and Spanish). Nilo Cruz’s libretto tweaks the Orpheus and Euridice myth, using fantasy elements to drive the narrative. Diego’s wish for Frida’s return to life triggers intercession by Catrina, and Frida reluctantly agrees to go back to earth, with encouragement from Leonardo, a dead actor with a Greta Garbo obsession. Once reunited, Frida and Diego remember their past as they struggle with the limits of their brief, conditional reunion.
Like Kahlo’s paintings, the production blends realistic and fantasy imagery. The somber opening tableau (sets by Jon Bausor) of Day of the Dead cemetery rituals, enlivened only by golden marigolds and flickering votives, is transformed with the appearance of Catrina. The cemetery disappears, the ground splits open, and Catrina, a skeleton draped in filmy gray robes, summons the dead by pounding the ground with her staff. Six dancers in drab peasant garb turn into crimson, muscle-clad skeletons who slither from glowing red fissures in the ground, nimbly entwining themselves with props and characters. They remain a constant reminder of the underworld.
By the second act, color reigns. Diego appears atop a scaffolding, where he struggles to complete a fresco. Against the ochre background, folkloric costumes, masks, and puppets provide a vibrant stage. Imagery from Kahlo and Rivera paintings, including an oversized portrait of Frida reflecting off the mirrored ceiling, are a reminder of the couple’s art. The vivid costumes by Jon Bausor and Wilberth Gonzalez were constructed in 11 workshops (with separate program credits for the Oaxacan Muxe embroidery, puppets, and masks).
The staging is immediately gorgeous and vivid, but Frank’s score is rich and colorful as well. Easy to listen to without being formulaic or predictable, it combines powerful orchestral passages, characterful instrumentation with suggestions of Mexican folklore, and emotionally expressive vocal writing. Strategically introduced wind dissonance suggests the presence of Catrina’s magic, and the extensive use of the chorus creates a community with shared beliefs. The music of each scene is delineated with changes in instrumentation, scale, and energy, clarifying the shifts in the dramatic flow. Frank’s musical language is expressive and appealing.
And yet. For all the glories of the music and the staging, the drama is essentially static, because almost nothing happens. It takes an hour for Diego to pray for Frida’s return to earth and for her to agree to undertake the journey. In Act II, the pair talk, and at the end (spoiler alert) Diego dies, uniting the pair forever in the underworld. Filling the stage time are bits of dialogue among villagers, the exhortations of the actor Leonardo, and powerful massed scenes with the chorus echoing the movements of the skeleton dancers (choreography by Deborah Colker). It’s all very pretty to look at but doesn’t add up to emotional catharsis.
Frida was portrayed by mezzo-soprano Isabel Leonard, who since her 2007 Met debut has become a favorite Mozart singer and the house Rosina of choice. Leonard is a wonderful, multi-talented artist, and Frida fit her voice very well, including fierce passages alternating chest and full mixed voice. But her acting didn’t quite reveal the artist’s feral side. She did put across the humor in her scenes with Diego, but she recalled a saucy ingenue more than the iron-willed Frida. It is likely that with several more performances under her belt, the HD broadcast on May 30 will reveal a more fully inhabited character.
As Diego, Carlos Álvarez seemed a bit lost. He was padded into corpulence and wearing the painter’s trademark plaid shirt and panama hat, but his characterization was more vague, grumpy old widower than magnetic and tyrannical artistic genius, and his pleasing Verdi baritone was a size or two underpowered for the space. Again, he has time to settle into and expand his interpretation before the HD transmission.
Soprano Gabriella Reyes delivered a scene-stealing performance as Catrina, the most powerful character in the opera. Her vocal dexterity, physicality, and charisma combined for a riveting portrayal. German countertenor Nils Wanderer made a compelling house debut as the ghost of Leonardo, the actor who dresses as Greta Garbo. His powerful voice and forceful presence boosted the energy onstage, even if his character’s fanciful connection to the story was peripheral at best. Wanderer, who has appeared in the U.S. only once before, is a real discovery.
Music director Yannick Nézet-Séguin led a well-paced and colorful performance, never covering the singers. The Met chorus, appearing many times throughout the evening, sounded robust and moved nimbly. Tilman Michael, finishing his second season as chorus director, has maintained the excellence of the ensemble.
Despite the musical and visual splendor, Frida y Diego left me longing for more drama. Magic realism, a favorite literary device of Latin American authors, can be tricky to pull off theatrically. Here, the porous boundaries between the living and the dead seemed more like a Baroque convention, a standard deus ex machina, than a truly magical force with resonance for a modern scientific age. Diego and Frida’s second-act conversations never quite conveyed the overwhelming importance of art to each of them, and the final scene, when Catrina quietly allows Diego to join his beloved in the underworld, felt anticlimactic. The death of a title character should not seem like an afterthought.
El Ultimo Sueño de Frida y Diego runs through June 5. For tickets and information, go here.
