‘Lucia di Lammermoor’ Review: Despair Made Magnetic

The Met’s new production of the Donizetti work, by Simon Stone and dubbed ‘Lucia: Closeups of a Cursed Life,’ transports the tragic tale to a dying American Rust Belt community in the present day.

By Heidi Waleson

April 25, 2022 5:10 pm ET

Simon Stone’s remarkable new production of Donizetti’s “ Lucia di Lammermoor, ” which opened at the Metropolitan Opera on Saturday, updates the opera to a dying American Rust Belt community in the present day and dubs it “Lucia: Closeups of a Cursed Life.” 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.

Based on a novel by Sir Walter Scott, set centuries ago in a world of warring Scottish aristocrats, the story translates neatly to the present. Enrico (Artur Ruciński) plans to marry his sister Lucia ( Nadine Sierra ) to Arturo ( Eric Ferring ) to revive the failing family fortunes. Their shared commercial interests aren’t specified—here Enrico seems to run a shady car business—but criminality is implied. Lizzie Clachan’s astonishing set, in which facades and cross-sections of buildings— including a pawn shop, a 24-hour pharmacy, a motel with a neon cross on its roof, and more—are jammed into claustrophobic proximity and viewed from constantly changing angles, evokes the seediness and desperation of the town. Video, some of it filmed in real time by onstage camera operators who follow the characters around, offers still more angles and closeups. We can watch Lucia climbing out her bedroom window to join her lover Edgardo (Javier Camarena) in the mini mart where he is a cashier while Enrico plots in his downstairs office. And that’s just the first scene. 

The direction explicitly heightens the opera’s central themes of escape and violence. Lucia visits the pharmacy and swallows some opioids; she is high when she sees the ghost at the fountain (a water treatment plant). The ghost, seen on video, is a young woman bleeding to death after being stabbed by her lover. Lucia and Edgardo meet behind the screen of a drive-in movie that is showing a 1947 Bob Hope comedy (an unlikely choice, but certainly escapist); Edgardo leaves his dead-end job to join the army. Enrico, threatening Lucia, seizes her by the hair and shoves her, a warning of worse to come. As Edgardo and Enrico face off at the end of Act 2, after Edgardo interrupts the forced wedding ceremony, a group of women in the background launch into a kicking, hair-pulling fight of their own. 

Ms. Sierra’s Lucia, in tight pants, crop top and a pale pink bomber jacket, is no fragile flower. With her crystalline soprano, bright, fluid coloratura and fearless ornamentation, she comes vividly alive and tries to resist her fate. Her mad scene feels more like a suicidal performance. Beautifully and confidently sung—especially the duet with the eerie glass harmonica—it is her construction of the wedding she wanted for the benefit of the guests. On the stage, she’s covered head to foot in Arturo’s blood (we’ve already seen his blood-soaked body in the motel room); in the video, she’s kissing Edgardo in the motel. There’s no collapse or vague death from the vapors—on the video, she grabs a gun and blood spatters on the wall behind her. There may be no way out for Lucia, but she took one male tormentor with her. There is some loss of poignancy as a result, however. Can we only feel for female operatic victims if they go without a fight?

Interestingly, the production gives space to the struggles of the opera’s men as well. Mr. Camarena, a thrilling bel canto tenor, makes Edgardo sympathetic as well as amorous and hot-headed. Even the bully Enrico, stalwartly sung by Mr. Ruciński, seems caught in the toils of economic decline. The scene at the beginning of Act 3, when Enrico, waving a whiskey bottle, leaves the wedding to challenge Edgardo to a fight, suggests that their mutual male aggression stems from a hopeless lack of options. For sheer unexpectedness, this had some of the poignancy that the subsequent mad scene lacked. Bass Matthew Rose avoided the unctuous manner that can affect Raimondo, the priest/confidant who betrays Lucia; his singing and demeanor were chillingly accepting of his own powerlessness, even as he sat beside Arturo’s bloody corpse. 

Conductor Riccardo Frizza’s stylish and buoyant reading of the score worked securely in tandem with Mr. Stone’s direction, reflecting its continual motion, yet knowing when to stop and expand into a moment, such as the long breaths of the Act 2 sextet. The chorus work improved after some coordination issues in the first scene. Costumes like Enrico’s drab plaid shirt and Arturo’s sharp pink suit, by Alice Babidge and Blanca Añón, helped cement the milieu. James Farncombe’s lighting made the set’s innumerable details pop, and evoked mood and time with clinical precision. As the buildings broke apart, turned, and were shoved together in different configurations, the audience could experience the disorientation that unmoors and destroys the opera’s characters along with them. 

—Ms. Waleson writes on opera for the Journal and is the author of “Mad Scenes and Exit Arias: The Death of the New York City Opera and the Future of Opera in America” (Metropolitan).