"There is a dull emptiness at the work’s center. While scenically intriguing and superbly sung and played — with Nadine Sierra, Javier Camarena and Artur Rucinski in excellent voice, and Riccardo Frizza conducting with fluidity, briskness and grandeur — this new 'Lucia' is ultimately unaffecting and unpersuasive."
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"It’s not easy to negotiate the disjunction between opera speed and Hollywood pacing. In an aria, as in real life, expressing discontent to anyone who will listen is a time-consuming business. It doesn’t jibe well with an aesthetic of quick cuts and shifting perspectives. Stone deals with the problem by having the sets go slowly spinning in overlapping orbits. He also sends the characters on long walks around the stage to distract from the fact that they keep singing at length about the same damn thing."
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"The show is a feat of technical wizardry, encompassing a turntable that revolves almost constantly—during the action and while set pieces are moved on and off it—as well as a lot of live and pre-recorded video. Yet the most startling effect is how profoundly this thoughtful interpretation erases the opera’s Romantic aura and accentuates its universal despair, upending the traditional balance of tragedy elevated through beautiful sounds. Here, the singers, especially the two splendid leads, really seem to be singing for their lives."
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"Some may find the entire enterprise a too demanding, distracting way to present Donizetti and Cammarano’s familiar, doomed characters, though Millennials and GenZers might welcome its multi-media approach. In any case, Stone doesn’t at all rewrite the drama"
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"Although its surfaces may seem familiar at first, over the course of three meticulously modernized acts, this blighted, unidentified patch of dystopia reveals itself as a far more unforgiving landscape. It’s an amalgam of Lucia’s internal and external terrain, a hybrid of a hardscrabble life and an unruly dream."
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"Met general manager Peter Gelb is smart to employ directors like Stone and Ivo van Hove, whose production of 'Don Giovanni' will debut next season. They bring a perspective that the company has ignored for too long, and they challenge notions of what classic opera should look like. But Stone’s first outing is too muddled and inconsistent to make a lasting impression. I would have preferred true unhinged madness to light shock."
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"This was a production that people wanted to talk about, even with strangers. At intermission a man asked me what I thought. I said that it worked for me, but that the videos were distracting. He responded that he was a multi-media enthusiastic, so that element fascinated him, quickly adding that the entire concept would resonate with his daughter far more than a traditional staging. Undoubtedly, that’s exactly the response for which the Met was hoping."
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"From the very start of the opera until the end, the audience is forced to make a very problematic choice—watch a massive movie screen hanging over the proscenium (and sometimes even on the proscenium) or watch what is happening onstage."
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