‘Antony and Cleopatra’ Review: John Adams’s Avant-Garde Shakespeare

In San Francisco, the celebrated minimalist’s newest opera attempts to balance political drama with romantic tragedy but is held back by its reliance on traditional tropes

Amina Edris and Gerald Finley

PHOTO: CORY WEAVER/SAN FRANCISCO OPERA

By Heidi Waleson

Sept. 13, 2022 5:44 pm ET

San Francisco

The San Francisco Opera, celebrating its centennial this season, is optimistically touting the future of opera as a living art form rather than simply recalling the glorious past. In keeping with that theme, it opened the season with “Antony and Cleopatra,” a world premiere by John Adams, who blazed a new operatic trail in 1987 with “Nixon in China.” Now 75 years old, he is one of America’s most celebrated composers. 

With “Antony,” Mr. Adams has embarked on yet another path. Rather than setting another pastiche libretto created by Peter Sellars, his longtime collaborator, he adapted his own text from the Shakespeare play. With a complex narrative and three strong characters built in, his “Antony” is paced more like a drama than his oratorio-style works “Girls of the Golden West” and “Doctor Atomic.” The orchestration is inventive and encyclopedic; the sprawling dramaturgy well-corralled; the text setting clear. But why this story? Mr. Adams may have thought to measure himself against Verdi’s final Shakespearean masterpieces, “Falstaff” and especially “Otello.” But his style doesn’t lend itself to the grand catharsis of romantic tragedy; as in his earlier operas, the effect is intellectual rather than emotional. The lovers die, but we don’t weep for them. 

In consultation with director Elkhanah Pulitzer and dramaturge Lucia Scheckner, Mr. Adams strategically narrowed the libretto’s focus to the political conflict between Antony, the great Roman warrior, and the young Caesar (Octavian). Once allies following the murder of Julius Caesar a decade earlier in 44 B.C., they are estranged due to Antony’s liaison with Cleopatra, the fascinating Queen of Egypt. Antony, the “old lion,” is dallying in the fleshpots of the East and neglecting his military obligations. Summoned to Rome and married off to Caesar’s sister Octavia, Antony soon returns to his lover. Caesar declares war on them; Cleopatra’s ships flee in the battle of Actium, and when Antony follows his humiliation is complete. That’s Act 1. Act 2 includes Caesar’s lengthy demagogic speech about his world-domination intentions (interpolated from Virgil’s “Aeneid”; Caesar would become Augustus, the first emperor of Rome) and the serial suicides of the defeated lovers. 

There should be a dramatic balance between Rome and Egypt, but in the opera the strength of Caesar’s calculating, ruthless character, communicated with ferocious directness by tenor Paul Appleby, means that the lovers don’t have a chance. Mr. Adams’s music evokes a languid, seductive atmosphere in the Egyptian scenes, but Cleopatra herself, sung by the eloquent soprano Amina Edris, seems more manipulatively petulant than magnetic in her “infinite variety.” Poor Antony, a despondent Gerald Finley, repeatedly tries to break free and reclaim his soldier’s honor but gets pulled back in again and again. Various male characters—including Antony—call Cleopatra a whore, and the production concept, which depicts her as a screen siren in 1930s Hollywood, plays up the performative nature of her mercurial personality. It’s hard to pull that off and be sympathetic, and Ms. Edris, who took over the part when Julia Bullock, for whom it was written, dropped out due to pregnancy, doesn’t have a big enough stage presence. 

A scene from ‘Antony and Cleopatra’

PHOTO: CORY WEAVER/SAN FRANCISCO OPERA

Musically, there are splendid moments. The love scenes in which Cleopatra draws Antony back into her orbit have a magical serenity. The opening of Act 2, when they reconcile after the Actium disaster, has an elegant Stravinskian clarity, as the lovers first talk past each other and then kiss; Antony’s death is a poignant, long-breathed sigh, tuning out the world of the martial, brass-heavy Roman sequences. 

The orchestral writing is kaleidoscopically grand, particularly during the scene changes, and Mr. Adams drops in the occasional sly reference, like a quote from Wagner’s “Ring” as the set shifts from Rome to Egypt before Actium. One ingenious orchestral flourish is the use of the cimbalom, whose percussive twang gives the score an exotic color without making it ethnically stereotypical. The vocal writing is carefully tailored for textual intelligibility, and each of the principals has a distinct vocal character—Cleopatra’s undulating seductiveness, Antony’s struggle, Caesar’s implacability. Supporting roles are also notable: the smooth-tongued Roman general Agrippa (baritone Hadleigh Adams); the throaty Charmian, Cleopatra’s attendant (Taylor Raven); the upright Octavia (Elizabeth DeShong); Antony’s loyal lieutenant Enobarbus (Alfred Walker). The chorus goes from horrified observer (narrating the battle of Actium) to sycophantic echo of Caesar’s “rule the world” speech, making a long sequence seem even longer and scarier. Conductor Eun Sun Kim ably balanced grandeur with intimacy. 

Mimi Lien’s sets effectively used the device of a camera lens opening and closing to frame the scenes and transition seamlessly from Alexandria to Rome and Greece. Period (1930s) newsreels evoked the Roman crowds and Caesar’s political prowess; giant images of his face contorting as he delivered his oration suggested Mussolini; they contrasted with images of Cleopatra, the movie star, gazing impassively. (Bill Morrison designed the projections; David Finn the filmic lighting.) Constance Hoffman’s costumes—Cleopatra’s negligees and flowing jumpsuits, the suits and military uniforms of the Romans—also set up the dichotomy and ensured the eventual Roman triumph. Ms. Pulitzer’s directing worked best in the intimate scenes; the battle of Actium, with supernumeraries carrying sails and flashing lights, was hard to follow. 

Is “Antony and Cleopatra” representative of the future of opera? One could infer a contemporary political commentary about a republic giving way to an empire that crushes all in its path. But in choosing a Shakespearean text—and not deconstructing it, in the manner of Brett Dean’s “Hamlet,” for example—Mr. Adams hews to a traditional narrative, and the heroine dies in the end. At least she’s not a victim. For a more modern story, we’ll have to wait until June 2023, when San Francisco does Gabriela Lena Frank’s “El último sueño de Frida y Diego,” or for the 2023-24 season, when Kaija Saariaho’s “Innocence,” about the aftermath of a school shooting, will be on the bill. 

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).