(Credit: MetropolItan Opera / Ken Howard)

WARNING: This review features explicit language. It also uses some variation of the word “frustrating” a lot.

To use a line from the cathartic and sublime climax in Jeanine Tesori and George Brant’s “Grounded” – “What the f*ck?”

That quotidian expression perfectly encapsulates, in the context of the climax and at large, the frustration of experiencing this new opera.

For context, the opera tells the story of star military pilot Jess as she has to give up her dream when she becomes pregnant. When she’s ready to go back to war, she finds herself in Las Vegas, flying drones in Afghanistan from the “comfort of her home.” This leads to her struggling a work-life balance and the eventual realization that… war is horrific. It’s much deeper than that actually, even if the means to get there is frustratingly uninspired. Jess is literally in the war at the beginning, but she’s up in the sky and ironically more distanced from the damage she’s doing. But when she’s in a control room thousands of miles away, the new technology allows her to see more details that she never saw up in the sky. Being so far and yet so close makes her more and more uncomfortable, to the point that she sees the threat of war everywhere.

In the interim, Brant’s libretto (an adaptation of his own one-woman play), jumps around a lot, exploring Jess’ obsession with being a war hero to the point that she has a split personality (expressed by having her portrayed in the second half by a soprano to complement the main mezzo) and how it affects her stunted home life.

Brant’s libretto, in an attempt toward authenticity, is replete with expletives – lots of “f*cks”  and lots of “sh*ts” are given (or not). There is nothing inherently wrong with this use of language because it can be a feature in the larger context. In opera, where language is often poetic, this crassness can be expressive as a contrast. And in a way, the opera attempts this. Unfortunately, and frustratingly, the “poetic” language isn’t really all that inspired or profound (we get people singing about cinnamon smell at one point to accompany one of the opera’s best tunes). Jess’ opening aria “Blue” is the perfect opportunity to give us insight into her passion for the sky and larger excitement of being a war. But it ends up repeating itself and never really digs into this kind of emotional depth. I remember the word “Blue” being used a lot and it definitely planted a decent seed for when contrasting payoffs like “pink” (when Jess gets pregnant) or “grey” (the color Jess has to experience in the control room) take over. But that opening segment and later ones, rarely allow us the poetic depth that would allow all the cursing to have a fundamental impact it could have outside of some cheap and uncomfortable laughs.

BOOM

Before I delve into the subject of humor, the choice of repetition was actually a welcome surprise. In a world where modern opera composers seem allergic to engage the artform on its terms when it comes to the text, it was nice to see a libretto that realizes that repetition of text is a tool that allows the audience to get an opportunity to listen to the music and engage with it. Having new dialogue and text, to express the authenticity of real-life conversation, every other line forces you to focus in on the dialogue, the consequence being that the music takes a backseat. When the text repeats itself, the music gets to take over. It’s a balance that composers of old managed with the recitative/aria or duets or ensembles packages. In modern opera, where that line must be blurred for theatrical authenticity or whatever, that delicate balance is often overlooked. It was great to see an opera that understood itself to be an opera and thus engaged its audience on those terms.

Which makes it all the more frustrating that this opera about identity was so sorely lacking in one. Let’s talk pathos and bathos. The former is all about provoking authentic emotions. The sublime and ethereal if you will. The latter is about an anticlimactic shift in the mood, ridiculing what came before. And that’s where I come back to my opening line of this review. At the peak of the opera, after all her heartache and challenge with coming to terms with who she is; after seeing her daughter reflected in the little girl in Afghanistan she might kill; after realizing that she’s not a hero but a murderer in the sky; after all this, Jess makes the choice to disobey orders and destroy the drone knowing what it will cost her. She’s making a sacrifice for the greater good. Actually becoming a true hero. It’s a moment of catharsis, Tesori’s music at its most riveting… We finally feel something for Jess. We finally understand where the opera’s been building to. We finally make sense of why we’ve been struggling in our seats for nearly two hours–

“What the f*ck?”

That’s the very next thing that comes out of her “co-pilot’s” mouth. And you know what happened next? Lots of laughter. Lots and lots of laughter.

Is it an authentic dramatic response in the moment? Sure. Was it funny? Sure. But was that really the right choice? Most definitely not. It destroyed the moment and simply eroded away all the goodwill that moment had built after a… frustrating night. The opera attempts to regain its composure with the revelation that another drone was nearby as backup and does what Jess couldn’t do, but by then it’s too little too late. The laughter has already drowned out the sorrow, broken the tension, undercut the emotion. From pathos to bathos.

And that’s really the throughline of the entire opera – solid buildups that are immediately undercut by ridicule.

Humor is key to this opera. It’s a feature of a lot of Broadway musicals and given that Tesori is composer of that artform, it’s no surprise that we’d see that signature here. And in an opera whose identity is fractured, having humor is key to exploring these dimensions. The most inspired laugh came early in the show when Eric, Jess’ husband-to-be, mentions that the sights are beautiful where he’s going to take her and she responds that he’d be doing something wrong if she noticed the sights. That reference to seeing things clearly gets some more humor in the ensuing scene when she notes that she saw everything about Wyoming she needed to see and references his body. But that’s probably the most refined of the laughs we got all night with the rest being expletive-driven, no doubt the cognitive dissonance produced from being in an opera house where you never expect to hear that language. There’s one at the top of Act two where the shopping mall folks talk about cinnamon in the air. But that moment came out of nowhere, especially in something attempting “authenticity” in its dialogue because no one talks about the smell of cinnamon in the air. It was too obvious this was going for the laughs.

Finally, the pacing of it all is messy. The first half felt like it was arriving at a natural ending when Jess first enters the control room, but then it cuts back to family life for a short scene, before going back to the control room. The family scene was so short and inconsequential (purposely) that the two control room scenes should have been connected to give Jess her first success behind the chair quickly. Moreover, her new directive to get the “serpent” should have also come at the close of this act because dramatically, I felt that the first half was so loaded up and had found a natural conclusion that there was little else to say at that point. The main conflicts presented to that point actually felt resolved and I worried about what might come in Act two. Setting Jess up with that mission at the close of the first act presented a new dramatic question that needed resolution. Without it, there’s no clear sense of direction. What could possibly fill up another 50 minutes of drama?

And because we have no idea where this is going, Act two feels like a completely different story from the outset. It starts with the comments on the smell of cinnamon and proceeds to Jess suddenly being paranoid about the cameras following her everywhere (this scene probably should have joined the other 45 minutes that were reportedly cut). But then moments later she is back in the seat and excited again, the paranoia only getting a minor and haphazard development later when she’s with her daughter, a clear signpost to the audience that this is setting something else up later in the show. And unsurprisingly, it’s setting up the climax. It all feels inorganic and forced and most of Act two just trudges along at a snail-like pace even if, ironically, it features some of the best music in the show. We don’t get much depth in terms of Jess’ character aside from the same repetitive beats of her desires that have already expressed themselves. The moral quandaries of what she’s doing aren’t really broached until that climactic moment and then when we get one final moment to sit and reflect with her in her jail cell on her newfound freedom, she says “BOOM” and the opera ends.

“BOOM.”

There’s that bathos again. If that isn’t an expression to undercut the potential power of your own work, I don’t know what else is. It’s the most juvenile way to express something so devastating as an explosion, the text itself either intentionally toying with itself or simply lacking the means to express something deeper or more potent. “Boom” gets used in other moments when the soldiers talk about cities getting bombed, but in that context, it feels natural that this would be playtime for them. But for Jess, who is now in jail after making her sacrifice and suddenly feeling free, that rings extremely hollow. Just like that “What the F*ck?” this moment annihilates her character arc. It doesn’t help that we get nothing else after.

I don’t think this would bother me so much if I understood what the opera itself was trying to accomplish. Is it trying to be post-modern and deconstructionist in its approach? Sometimes I felt that way. Does it want us to have a more “naturalistic” approach (is that even possible in opera) and play it straight? Sometimes it felt that way. Were any of the emotional highs actually supposed to be important when they seemingly get ridiculed right away? Were some of the laughs with or at the work? Nothing’s clear.

And that’s frustrating.

Tesori’s Musical Treasures

It’s all the more maddening because for the first time in a long time, I felt the Met Opera actually put on a new work that knows it’s an opera and has the music to substantiate that idea.

For here’s a score that has actual, identifiable motifs and toys with them. The work opens on a drum beat (shocker, I know) and then launches into a massive male chorus with a catchy tune. Then we get an entrance aria for our lead character in which she expresses her passion with soaring high notes that match her flying high and being the “top sh*t.” While the text isn’t great, the music makes up for it in some ways allowing us to soar with Jess in this moment of musical ecstasy.

Then we get arid trills in the strings as they fly over the desert followed by a fun bar-tune and a “love motif” that seems to subtly quote the opening figure of Carmen’s “Habanera” before switching to something else. There’s even a solo clarinet to join Eric’s approach toward Jess that has a hint of Italian bel canto.

The ensuing love duet continually gets disrupted by Jess’ inability to cope emotionally with the fact she’s falling in love (a funny moment as well when she says “What the f*ck is happening”). That we never get a full development of it ever in the opera is, yes, frustrating, but also understandable since the relationship never gets a chance to truly flourish.

There’s a beautiful aria for Eric to express how he didn’t see his life changing the way it did, followed by a similarly lyrical moment for the family together. Then Tesori packs more muscularity into the war scenes, channeling some John Williams in some moments, then later on Philip Glass, and even, in a “blink and you’ll miss it” moment, a quote from the prelude of “Die Walküre” as she chases down “the serpent.” The choice to split Jess into two voice types in the second half is also inspired and leads to one of the most breathtaking moments of the entire night, a duet between the two with unison lines converging at points and unsteady dissonance (actually a rarity in this piece) heightening that misalignment.

There’s a lot of craft and thought that went into the music here and it’s just so disheartening that it is in service of such a sloppy drama and thus feels a bit lacking in cohesion.

The Frustrating Case of Michael Mayer

Things aren’t serviced by the production, directed by Michael Mayers in, ironically, his best effort to date at the hallowed house.

The best and worst compliment I can give the production is that it was bland. At the very least it got the job done; but alternatively, it just never stuck the landing on a ton of ideas.

The production itself is self-evident in what it’s attempting to do. Sky = high. The home world = low. So the stage is split into two halves with domestic affairs on the ground and Jess’ career on the higher plane. In the second half, the soprano and mezzo occupy different zones, emphasizing her fractured sense of self. It’s not a bad idea, just poorly executed because the lower half is so tucked in below the top half that it’s not fully visible in the lower part of the house and most definitely (from conversations with people sitting up in the family circle) not from the top. I get it. The Met Opera is a massive venue and there’s no way a director can service everyone. But it is essential to be clear about that and try and do the best to make sure a major part of your story is clearly visible to EVERYONE on some level. Mayer didn’t seem to try all that hard.

The projections by Jason H. Thompson and Kaitlyn Pietras were a missed opportunity. Here was an opportunity to truly immerse us or confront us with Jess’ world. Even in abstract terms, see what she’s seeing. OR… confront the viewer with the atrocities of war and play up the fact of what she fails to see so that when she sees it, her moral compass is truly challenged. But it does neither of these. It plays it too safe. The intention seems to be just grayness to emphasize the emptiness of it all… And it surely feels empty. And that’s about it. No more depth than that. War is empty. Thanks for the revelation.

As an aside – if you’re going to make the effort to put an opera onstage about the atrocities of war (especially in the social and political context in which it is presented), then actually go for it (and for the “opera shouldn’t be political, it’s art” crowd, war is political and this opera is about a very specific war that we can all agree to be very politicized. Also… go watch a Verdi opera).

Otherwise, the projections don’t do much else other than the expected. “BOOM” and we get a flash of light to signal an explosion. “Blue” and we get a blue background. “Pink” and we get… And on and on. I don’t fault Thompson or Pietras, both in their debuts. That’s on the director’s lack of vision. Spending all that money on projections to do something you simply could have done with simpler and likely less expensive means is questionable, especially for a company that had to pull from its endowment halfway through the 2023-24 season. The Met Opera Board should be looking into that.

The only moment where the use of new technology made any sense was the live camera on Jess, showing how she feels like a target of her own aspirations.

So in my eyes, it’s 0-for-4 for Mayer at the Met. His “Rigoletto” was style over substance with diminishing returns. “Marnie” is just as messy as the opera it accompanies. His “Traviata” is cartoonish in its execution. Now to be clear, Mayer is not only an opera director and not being familiar with his other work, I am not qualified to make judgments on that either. There’s certainly a reason he got a chance to be at the Met to begin with and it’s likely that past success opened that door. But personally, opera is not his strong suit. To say I am not looking forward to his being given the keys to “Aida,” a massive repertory staple, is an understatement.

Star of the Night

But you know what is most frustrating of all? That mezzo-soprano Emily D’Angelo is a major opera star and deserved a lot more in her first leading role at the Met Opera. From the opening “Blue” all the way to the final “BOOM” she commanded the stage, delivering an all-timer at the Met.

She has stage presence to spare and even when the stage direction had her do nothing but sit for minutes on end, D’Angelo managed to give Jess life. She managed to reel you in and keep you invested. If not for her, the entire enterprise would have fallen apart. She couldn’t save the night, but she sure as hell did her utmost to try.

D’Angelo’s voice soared gloriously in that opening aria with technical precision and roundness in her sound. She made the most of Tesori’s decision to “lighten” Jess’ vocal line in domestic moments, with more spoken lines interrupting the love duet or the moment where she commits to “Classified” when Eric asks her about work. In an overly short and curt exchange between them, she mentions how Odysseus’ story would have been different if he went home everyday (there was definitely space for a poetic aria in here somewhere), her sound the softest and most pointed of the night. Contrast this with her war scenes, where D’Angelo’s voice was at its most muscular and aggressive, especially as she pursues the serpent.

But the duet with Ellie Dehn (the other version of herself) was undoubtedly the high point musically overall. D’Angelo’s voice blended gloriously with Dehn’s and the two managed a sublime balance of sound and color. The unison moments were perfection and then the dissonances that accompanied them were unsettling in their purity. This was spell-binding music-making.

As mentioned, the live camera was effective and D’Angelo was the reason. She managed to strike a balance with the camera where her expressions suited that medium without undercutting her stage performance.

As Eric, Ben Bliss sang beautifully in the moments where the score allowed his voice to soar with verismo-like lines. This was best represented during his aria where he comments on not seeing his daughter coming. As the show drags on, he becomes less prominent and wasn’t given much to do when he did show up. There were also instances where the orchestra overpowered him.

Greer Grimsley’s Commander is foul-mouthed and the bass’ growling sound matched that characterization well.

Kyle Miller relished his role as the Sensor, playing up the comedy as best as he could and delivering with a rich and sonorous baritone.

As Eric and Jess’ daughter Sam, Lucy LoBue had a heart-warming interjection during their family scene in Act one.

The opera also featured the talents of Earle Patriarco, Christopher Bozeka, Thomas Capobianco, Paul Corona, Christopher Job, Matthew Anchel, Timothy Murray, Tyler Simpson, and Patrick Miller in limited roles. The cast on the whole clearly put in the work and did their utmost to lift the evening.

Same could be said for conductor Yannick Nézet-Séguin, who just always seems to do his best work in the contemporary operas. His trees from the forest signature approach is frustrating in standard repertory, but certainly helps to get a grasp on contemporary works. And there’s no way I would have appreciated Tesori’s work as much as I did if not for the conductor’s performance. He lacked a sense of balance with the singers (another signature), but had a strong sense of pacing (not always a signature). The opera’s lack of cohesion and poor pacing was definitely not on him and he, like D’Angelo, did his utmost to elevate the work.

In sum, it was… a frustrating experience – a story that felt like it had more to give (and more to cut as well) and a production that certainly could have done more to fill in those blanks. But, also a night salvaged by an artist that should be getting other opportunities to do more starring roles at the Met.