Opera Note: Met HD Peter Grimes (Is Peter A Murderer (etc.)?

Disjointed notes on the HD theatre performance of the Met’s Peter Grimes.

One, is Peter a murderer? Those 'prentice boys do have a way of disappearing on him. The last two times I saw it, I thought he was just unlucky. This time, I thought he was a murderer. The tipoff is a critical bit about the middle where Ellen Orford (Patricia Racette) asks Peter (Anthony Dean Griffey) how “the boy” got his bruise. Peter says it was an accident. But for just a moment before he responds, he flashes a guilty grin.

Peter is not a grinner (although Griffey can be); it’s a tipoff that Griffey, at least, knows that his character has secrets to conceal.

Remarkably, Griffey himself isn’t telling. In an interview, Natalie Dessay asked him if he thought Peter was guilty. He hemmed and hawed and muttered something about the presumption of innocence. Evidently he thinks it is for him to know, and for us to find out. Well, I’ll grant him that: this is clearly (as he said) the role he was born to play: big, ungainly, shy, Peter is the natural outcast, and the success of Griffey’s performance is that for all his character’s culpability, he can excite our compassion (for Griffey's extraordinary story, go here).

Two, the set. It’s big flat black wall with windows and doors, like some nightmarish version of the joke wall in the old Laugh-In show. It’s apparently modeled on the Broadway Revival of Sweeney Todd a couple of years back (Mrs. Buce saw; I did not). Apparently it worked for Sweeney Todd, but it’s been getting bad press in Peter Grimes. No wonder: what might work in a small theatre is bound to be a mess on one of the biggest stages in the world.

But in the Palookaville Multiplex, you never know it’s a problem. There are many cameras, so many angles, so many swoops and leaps that you hardly notice it as a single black surface. One more reason why the Multiplex can upstage the stage.

Three, but maybe not. All over America (and, I guess, the world) every time you slide into the theatre, you are reminded that you are not in Manhattan, not in Lincoln Center. Note to self, clear the calendar, cash in the frequent flyer miles and head for JFK. And with the dollar so cheap… oh wait, we are the dollar. Ah well, the fact is that even—maybe especially—in Palookaville, it looks pretty good.

Fn,: Turns out Patricia Racette and I went to the same high school. Cool. Wonder if she says the same about me.