Review: John Adams Returns to the Metropolitan Opera With Inert Antony and Cleopatra

In his long and distinguished career, American composer John Adams has shown a willingness to draw from recent history for his subjects. Thankfully, Adams has often backed up his ripped-from-the-headlines ambitions with distinctive vocal writing, evocative orchestral textures, and poetic libretti. Taking on Shakespeare—as he has done with his latest opera, Antony and Cleopatra, which made its New York premiere at the Metropolitan Opera last night—might seem like a step backward by comparison.

In one sense, Shakespeare’s original could be seen as one of his history plays, since it focuses on real people and dramatizes historical events. But it also features elements of many other genres in which Shakespeare regularly dabbled. The romance between Cleopatra (Julia Bullock), Egypt’s last queen, and Roman general Mark Antony (Gerald Finley) drives much of the action, a tempestuous love affair that ends in tragedy. But Antony and Cleopatra is as much about the rise of Antony’s fellow triumvir Octavius Caesar (Paul Appleby).

That path to power is paved with political machinations and violence both physical and emotional. At one point, Antony agrees to marry Caesar’s sister, Octavia (Elizabeth DeShong), to keep the peace between him and Caesar. But when a frustrated Octavia issues an ultimatum to Antony, he breaks his marriage vow, returns to Egypt, and marries Cleopatra. Caesar uses this as a pretext to declare war on him and all of Egypt, a move that an overconfident Antony welcomes until a naval battle goes disastrously wrong, a defeat he blames in large part on his obsession with Cleopatra.

The intersection of the political and the personal that Shakespeare’s play explores is also a major thematic underpinning in many of Adams’s previous operas, such as Nixon in China, revolving around Richard Nixon’s 1972 visit to the People’s Republic of China; The Death of Klinghoffer, his controversial dramatization of the Palestinian Liberation Front’s deadly hijacking of an Italian ocean liner in 1985; and Doctor Atomic, his take on the development of the atomic bomb. In that sense, Antony and Cleopatra isn’t as much of a departure as it at first seems.

Director Elkhanah Pulitzer emphasizes the drama’s contemporary resonance in her production, conceptualizing it to evoke 1930s Hollywood glamour as much as it does ancient Rome and Egypt. Mimi Lien’s scenic design features a large aperture that opens and closes on Art Deco-inspired settings in a cameralike manner, with Bill Morrison’s projection design featuring montages of newly filmed and archival footage in the manner of vintage March of Time newsreels. Constance Hoffman’s costume design also mixes the historical and the modern-day: While many of the characters wear the expected Roman tunics, Egyptian headpieces, and armor, Caesar, for instance, first appears in a blue business suit before donning full fascistic garb when he becomes emperor in Act 2. Choreographer Annie-B Parson similarly makes reference to authoritarian rallies and gestures in her goose-stepping choreography.

As visually and intellectually intriguing as the spectacle is, there’s also a remoteness to this Antony and Cleopatra that eventually becomes oppressive. Granted, Shakespeare’s play mostly avoids the introspective soliloquizing of many of his other works, and Adams’s own libretto stays mostly faithful to the Shakespearean idiom, with sprinklings of Plutarch, Virgil, and others. Such fidelity to the Bard, however, has come at a cost, drying out the emotional investment one ought to feel toward these two volatile characters. Even Arrigo Boito, in his libretto for Giuseppe Verdi’s late masterpiece Otello, was bold enough to come up with an aria for Iago to account for his villainy, which not even Shakespeare himself fully explained.

It’s a shame, because the second act in particular contains some of Adams’s most expressive and haunting music, brought to rich life by the Metropolitan Opera orchestra under Adams’s own direction. And the singers certainly give their all. Finley fully inhabits Antony’s decadence and machismo; Bullock uses her formidable soprano to craft a Cleopatra almost fearfully in thrall to her emotions; and Appleby is suitably slimy and manipulative as Caesar.

Of the supporting cast, Alfred Walker stands out as Enobarbus, one of Antony’s aides. If anything, thanks to Walker’s charismatic bass-baritone, one may come away feeling the most for this character’s internal conflict, torn between wanting to be faithful to Antony while realizing his cause is lost. Alas, the rest of this disappointingly inert Antony and Cleopatra may evoke a sensation best described by another Shakespeare play: “sound and fury, signifying nothing.”