NEW YORK — It’s no spoiler to let slip that Joseph De Rocher — the titular “Dead Man Walking” of composer Jake Heggie’s opera, which opened the Metropolitan Opera season on Tuesday — dies in the end.
But this looming inevitability did little to quell the shock that registered across the house over its (forgive this) execution. More on this shortly.
Heggie’s 2000 adaptation of Sister Helen Prejean’s best-selling 1993 memoir (which became an Oscar-winning 1995 film) has made a long and largely successful journey to its company premiere at the Met. Prejean, now 84, served as a spiritual adviser for two death row inmates at the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola. Originally slated for the 2020-2021 season but postponed by the pandemic, the show’s arrival this season now serves to reaffirm the Met’s post-covid-shutdown commitment to stage more contemporary works — and hopefully fill more seats.
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“Dead Man Walking” could very well deliver on the latter. Ivo van Hove’s new production is spare and unsparing, its action unfolding within an unadorned holding room designed by Jan Versweyveld and flooded with garishly hued light. Now and then, a roving crew of camera operators appear (quite conspicuously) onstage to feed close-ups of the singers to a massive cubic screen suspended over the stage like a colossal industrial vent.
Sans cells, bars or chains, the effect of this wide-open stage and free-roaming staging remains one of inescapable confinement. Even Heggie’s music — a roiling and often thrilling concoction of Britten-esque strings and Gershwin-esque winds, commandingly conducted by music director Yannick Nezet-Seguin — leaves little room for daylight. Attempts by the audience to applaud several arias were thwarted by Heggie’s relentless score, insistently ushering us toward De Rocher’s fate and allowing zero opportunities for the illusion to loosen. Heggie’s music rushes between evocations of the cold, mechanistic bureaucracy of capital punishment and the internal anxiety and turmoil of its protagonists.
It could be this engineered sense of captivity that allowed mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato’s turn as Sister Helen to achieve such flight. This is, to be sure, DiDonato’s show: She barely ever leaves the stage, the action never escapes her purview, and she’s as bound to her sense of divine duty to De Rocher as De Rocher is to the consequences of his crime.
Her embodiment of Prejean made a surprise appearance onstage to close the curtain call) was exquisitely sensitive and impressively sturdy. A lesser actress could flatten Prejean’s devotion into a one-note performance, but DiDonato’s was richly nuanced, the contours of her voice frayed by doubt, her expressions of faith clear and convincing — especially in her recurring hymn (“He Will Gather Us Around”), invoked at the opera’s beginning and (stirringly) at its end. Truly some of the finest and most engaged work I’ve ever seen or heard from DiDonato, a singer with little left to prove.
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Bass-baritone Ryan McKinny sang the role of De Rocher with figurative and literal muscular force, his crumbling stubbornness the source of a richly human performance. De Rocher is a fictionalized composite of two real prisoners counseled by Prejean, a bit of trivia that seems to authorize the schism at the heart of his character. In one of his most moving arias, he slides from bellowing reprisals of Sister Helen to a tremulous falsetto to sing the flimsy reassurance that “everything’s gonna be all right.” At the base of Prisoner 95281’s rage is a childlike humanity; and throughout, this precarious balancing act inspired revelatory singing, the surliness of his delivery undermined by a fissure of frailty and mounting fear.
My favorite supporting performance of the evening came from mezzo-soprano Susan Graham, who sang Joe’s mother — billed as Mrs. Patrick De Rocher. Twenty-three years ago, Graham created the role of Sister Helen at San Francisco Opera’s premiere of the opera. At the Met, she offered a practically flawless performance of the grief-stricken mother. Everything was on point, from her hair to the guarded clutching of her ever-present handbag to her heartbreakingly plain-spoken approach to the pardon committee — a moment that blooms into a devastating plea of an aria.
Soprano Latonia Moore, in her third season-opening role at the Met, was magnificent as Helen’s trusted companion Sister Rose — a gorgeous foil for DiDonato in sound and spirit.
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The principals were all boosted by an equally strong supporting cast. Baritone Justin Austin — who comes to Washington in December for his Marian Anderson Vocal Award recital — brought crackling character to his brief appearance as the motorcycle cop who pulls over a speeding Prejean’s tiny Datsun.
Tenor Chad Shelton lent his Father Grenville a sharpened cynicism — a man of God grown weary of God’s children. And bass Raymond Aceto struck an imposing Warden George Benton, his no-nonsense nature cut through with the grief of “just doing our jobs.” (“I’ll never get used to it,” he laments.)
Likewise, the parents of the murdered youths made a potent quartet of singers, responsible for some of the strongest ensemble singing of the evening. Mezzo-soprano Krysty Swann and tenor Chauncey Packer offered standout turns as Jade and Howard Boucher, the broken and embittered parents of the slain boy; while soprano Wendy Bryn Harmer and baritone Rod Gilfry gave powerful performances as Kitty and Owen Hart, the latter especially skillful in diluting the confidence of his voice to evoke his eroding convictions.
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Fundamental to the many strengths of this opera is the beautifully wrought libretto by the late Terrence McNally. It’s rare for a contemporary libretto to balance so many themes with such elegance and poetry. Though rich with detail and colloquial expression, McNally’s words are naturally suited to song and effortless in their delivery of cruel ironies.
The production is not without its problems. For our introduction to the prison at Angola, a riot’s worth of convicts burst through the doors in a cloud of smoke (is it a prison or a cryogenic chamber?) to engage in what feels like a mass caricature of how prisoners behave: They brawl, they curse, they ogle the “woman on the tier.” One of them leans in like human italics to deride Sister Helen: “I’m talking to you, [expletive]!” It’s a bit much.
Likewise overdoing it was van Hove’s cinematic opening, which projected a prerecorded dramatization of the sexual assault and murder of the two youths on a giant screen. While the violence certainly sets the conditions for the existential challenge of Prejean’s longing to forgive, it also feels heavy-handed and indulgent in its brutality.
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End of carouselThis discomfort returned at the opera’s conclusion — the execution of De Rocher by lethal injection. After nearly three hours of highly crafted minimalism, van Hove suddenly clutters the stage with props and objects: an execution bed with straps, an array of wheeled-out medical equipment, needles and tubes and screens. Any of the loose, conceptual, associative elements of the staging are tossed for a prolonged and stone-silent focus on the details of his execution: the insertion of the needle (so realistic that I twisted in my seat), the pumping of the sickly green poison, the long flatlining beep of the electrocardiogram — the only semblance of music as white light floods the stage.
There’s no satisfaction to be had in De Rocher’s death, but that doesn’t hinder van Hove’s apparent indulgence in it. If the tepid and scattered applause that followed the opera’s final plunge into darkness was any indication, our shared discomfort was more a product of the part than the whole. (The singers were all met with wild applause and standing ovations.)
Something about it felt, well, unjust — as though the lurid precision of De Rocher’s execution compromised the carefully constructed and gracefully composed world of Heggie’s music. And perhaps this was the point: to paint the justice meted out by the American prison system as no less violent or gratuitous than the crime itself. Despite how correct that may be, it still felt utterly wrong — though if life were fair, we would have no need for faith.
Dead Man Walking continues at the Metropolitan Opera through Oct. 21. metopera.com.
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