We learn much of what we know about Antony and Cleopatra in Shakespeare’s eponymous play through something of a non-entity. Enobarbus tells us that “Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale Her infinite variety.” By the time he says this, we’ve met the queen and formed our own impressions; depending on how you take her, Enobarbus’s description might feel like a confirmation, or it might feel like spin.
Spin—and its darker cousin, propaganda—is everywhere in Elkhannah Pulitzer’s production of John Adams’s Antony and Cleopatra, which comes to the Met after its premiere at San Francisco Opera in 2022 with a few cuts to the first half and the addition of ballet from Annie-B Parson. Elkhannah Pulitzer’s production draws much of its imagery from 1930s newsreels and fascist propaganda flicks. This is not a production about Hollywood, even if it is set in the era of the city’s golden age, but rather one about another industry that manipulates facts to make people seem like gods.
Adams himself conducts his score, which neatly synthesizes much of what we hear in his other operas; rhythmic propulsion, an excellent grasp of orchestration, and natural dramatic declamation. It’s not a masterpiece, but it is, for the most part, a highly competent contemporary opera, especially in its slimmed-down form. Cleopatra (Julia Bullock) and Antony (Gerald Finley) are introduced nearly in flagrante. These are public personalities, and sex is equally public for them. Why keep their hands to themselves? Pulitzer’s blocking is often highly dynamic and physical; characters are unafraid to grab, shove, and spin one another off-kilter. All the leaders are varying degrees of histrionic; Antony is impulsive and violent; Caesar is snippy and insecure; Cleopatra seems the most rational at first, but devolves into petty screams and slaps.
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Pulitzer’s setting produces many worthwhile resonances. Ancient Rome is full of protofascist mythology, much of which was taken up in the twentieth century. Caesar is styled like Mussolini, and Antony and Cleopatra feel a little like Edward VIII and Wallace Simpson, another couple where desire led to abdication of responsibility and media frenzy. Everywhere, people are being photographed and filmed as they enter and leave the halls of power. Parson’s choreography foretells disaster around the edges of the scenes, as dancers march and goose-step with sinister grace. The stakes are very high for Antony and Cleopatra’s love affair, and they only partly know it.
Mimi Lien’s hulking black set is seen through a giant camera lens, its aperture expanding and contracting to reveal various interiors from Alexandria, Rome, and Athens with tantalizing glimpses of water backstage. It’s an effective device, unlike the many projections of Julia Bullock’s face. Another time, it reveals Cleopatra in a film set drenched in gold lamé, as if participating in the 1930s craze for herself. Constance Hoffman’s costumes are at once sleek and resplendent, with a color palette ranging from neutral sands and beiges to metallic shimmers to rich jewel tones. This is a very good-looking production, one sure to photograph well.
The opera comes to life most fully during the face-off between Antony and rival Caesar. Caesar is powerful but has less commanding presence than his older counterpart; Antony broods in his chair like a lion while Caesar skitters around the office in a tizzy of outrage. Here, Adams’s music is marvelously intense, foretelling the eventual reversal of the men’s power, the tuba that accompanies Caesar emerging more solidly than the cimbalom that tells of Antony’s indecisiveness.
Paul Appleby was consistently excellent as Caesar, with a crisp, staunch tenor that cut like a dagger. Gerald Finley also had a fine night, after a bit of a rocky start, moving from an imposing scratchy baritone to something sweeter and softer by the second act. Jarrett Ott and Taylor Raven, making debuts as Agrippa and Cleopatra’s servant Charmian, respectively, each make positive impressions; Ott has a gripping, lucid baritone, while Raven possesses a potent contralto. Alfred Walker carries the weight of Shakespeare’s monologues as Enobarbus with a surprisingly subtle edge to his bass-baritone.
As a woman whose power is more perceived than felt, Julia Bullock is a dramatic powerhouse. She moves with a sizzling physical intensity, whether she is seducing, scrapping or breaking down in a fit of histrionics, and has a rich middle voice. But strained high notes meant that this infinitely varied queen did not have the vocal color to match her presence, especially as fatigue overtook her in the second act.
The first half finds a great deal of musical and dramatic tension in characters who are immobilized by their conflicting desires. Adams’s score, with its cimbalom, celesta and doubled-harp, thrums and jangles with restless torque, interspersed with nervous tenderness for poor Octavia (Elizabeth DeShong, who had something of a slow burn vocally but eventually acquired a beautiful richness).
The second half is simply immobile, a fault which lies more with the opera’s musical structure than with Pulitzer’s production. The arias for Enobarbus, Caesar, Antony and finally, Cleopatra herself are dramatically static, not least for coming one after another with little variety, and often are blocked without much motion. Caesar’s speech, which recalled mostly the balcony scene in Evita, hemmed Appleby into a box that, ironically, made him sound muffled from within its walls. And while Pulitzer’s images and use of color remain striking—Antony’s final aria sees him amongst projected clouds, while Cleopatra returns to die under a massive, eclipsing moon—they feel unmoored from the visual style of the rest of the opera.
The camera angle disappears entirely, leaving what should have been just the dramatic center of the opera: the love story between these two vain and deluded people. But here Adams gets in his own way, as the music becomes most predictable just as the opera should be reaching its emotional peak. Cleopatra’s final scenes are strangely muted for this larger-than-life figure; somehow, it feels like we know less about her, even as she finally tells us who she is.
It’s a strange irony in Adams’ book (and in Shakespeare’s) that Cleopatra is more interesting in description than in actuality. But then again, so is Antony, whom everyone describes inaccurately. Cleopatra herself is the worst offender, but Caesar’s eulogy is equally bizarre in its attempts to bury Antony with praise. Gentle? Noble? Brilliant? We see nothing of it, only a man who lashes out at his lover when he fails, reducing her from a multi-faceted creature to the flat epithet, “Egypt.” He’s rewritten the narrative. At its sharpest, Pulitzer’s production recognizes that this opera is about interpersonal propaganda as much as political propaganda. Love and death make us into all spin doctors.
