“Moby-Dick” Sets Sail at the Met Opera

Jane Bua
Bua writes about classical music for Goings On.

Among the most notable opening lines in literature is undoubtedly that of Herman Melville’s “Moby-Dick.” For just three words, “Call me Ishmael” packs a lot: a name, a metaphor, a friendship offer, an order. But the opera “Moby-Dick” doesn’t begin with that line; it earns it. In Jake Heggie’s score, the words appear instrumentally as an ebbing four-chord motif, but only when the story has finished, when it’s ready to be written down, are they uttered aloud. The character, who goes by Greenhorn in the opera, is “the needle pulling the thread of the audience with him,” Gene Scheer, the librettist, told me. “We’re watching it happen in real time.”

Beginning March 3, you can watch it in real time at the Metropolitan Opera, an arrival that has been years in the making. The new production doesn’t stray too far from its original form—any kinks in the libretto and music were worked out long ago, around when it first premièred in Dallas, in 2010. The Met, being the Met, offers a more expansive canvas. Notably, it has height. The opera takes place entirely on the water, forgoing the first sixteen land-bound chapters of its source text. Masts and ropes extend upward and are climbed by sailors, some bodies even ascending out of frame. On this new stage, the same altitude doesn’t eschew visibility. “The set is kind of like a giant skateboard ramp,” the director, Lenny Foglia, told me. “We’ve always had the height, but we’ve never been able to use it fully.” The stage itself also stretches about a foot out this time. Heggie told me, “Lenny has extended it over the pit, so it will be right in the audience’s face the whole time.” If you get hit with sweat, it’s simply more immersion.

The Met’s version also has updated technology—the opera uses nautical projections designed by Elaine McCarthy—and an expanded ensemble. “This will be by far the largest presentation of the production,” Heggie told me. “It’s herculean.” The principal vocalists—including the tenor Stephen Costello, who premièred the character of Greenhorn back in 2010; the tenor Brandon Jovanovich, as Captain Ahab; and Ryan Speedo Green, as the royal Polynesian harpooner Queequeg—and a robust chorus are bolstered, of course, by the Met’s orchestra. Will the famous whale continue to elude the audience as it has Ahab? “We may see a little bit more of it this time,” Foglia hinted, coyly. If there was ever a venue for it, it’s this one.

About Town

Indie Rock

As Father John Misty, the singer and multi-instrumentalist Josh Tillman stages albums as little psychodramas. Since his brief stint with the band Fleet Foxes, Tillman has built out existential concept records that span folk, big-band jazz, soft rock, and indie pop, with a satirist’s eye for the disturbingly absurd. His sophomore record, “I Love You, Honeybear,” which turned ten this month, was a breathtaking and baroque deconstruction of self, but subsequent releases have looked outward (and skyward), considering nihilism, celebrity, mortality, divinity, and their intersections. On his album from last year, “Mahashmashana,” which takes its title from a Sanskrit word for the cremation pit, he riffs on the idea of the place where the universe dies and is reborn, continuing a probing journey toward spiritual revelation.—Sheldon Pearce (Beacon Theatre; Feb. 26.)

Off Broadway

Hal (Elijah Jones), the young protagonist of Dakin Matthews’s “Henry IV”—an amalgamation of Shakespeare’s “Henry IV, Part 1” and “Part 2”—lives so dissolutely that his father (Matthews), the king of England, openly wishes his son had been switched at birth with the spitfire soldier Hotspur (James Udom). Yet Hal’s shenanigans, pursued in the company of Sir John Falstaff (Jay O. Sanders), that poor man’s bon vivant, mask aspirations of greatness. Likewise, this production meets the eye humbly, no more than a small stage with two chairs. Then, largely through the force of its language—wisely foregrounded by the director, Eric Tucker, and vivified by a cast with several standouts, including Udom and Sanders—it grows to encompass a murmuring woods, a raucous pub, and the rocky, sometimes treacherous terrain of personal ambition.—Dan Stahl (Polonsky Shakespeare Center; through March 2.)

Art