In Aida’s final scene, the treasonous general Radamés, who has been interred as punishment, finds his slave princess waiting for him in the shadows. “You, here in this tomb?” he asks in amazement. Buddy, I know how you feel. There’s a sepulchral vibe to Michael Mayer’s new staging for the Metropolitan Opera, a dutiful splendor that at times had me wondering how soon someone would roll the stone slab back and let my people go home. This production replaces the Orientalist extravaganza that Sonya Frisell directed in 1988 and that came to define the grand-opera experience — dazzling, uplifting, gloriously tacky — for two generations. Its glitter reflected the score’s magnificence and guaranteed a fun show even on nights with a fourth-string cast. Mayer’s version purports to take the work more seriously — it doesn’t just have melodies but cultural themes! — and winds up undercutting it.
The action begins not in Ancient Egypt but in the 1920s, when the archaeologist Howard Carter penetrated King Tut’s tomb. We see an explorer in an Indiana Jones outfit dropping into the chamber from a rope; it’s his arrival that lights up the polychrome walls and launches the story. From time to time, little knots of archaeologists — or maybe they’re respectable grave robbers — troop across the stage to remind the audience that they’re watching a projection of the modern imagination. That sort of distancing irony is a way of directing the opera while holding your nose. It sends the reassuring message that we’re not exoticism-besotted westerners romanticizing cultures we don’t remotely understand — no, we’re critiquing exoticism-besotted westerners romanticizing cultures they don’t remotely understand. Yes, Aida is an old-fashioned blockbuster, a tale of bloodthirsty slavers, desert vendettas, and love amid the pyramids. Like Tintin and The Jungle Book and Huckleberry Finn, it crashes through today’s cultural sensitivities. So either stage it or don’t, but packaging its grandeur with an apologetic shrug is trying to have it both ways.
The result is a staging of half-hearted opulence, with massive walls that trundle into position, squeezing the crowds or parting to reveal a giant staircase suitable for processions. The pacing ranges from static to stately — except for one bizarrely antic dance sequence in which a troupe of shirtless men in skirts, boots, and leather helmets lets loose, stomping, dabbing, and twerking. Then the slo-mo singers return, and not even the usually propulsive conductor Yannick Nézet-Séguin can give this clunker some zip.
The new production opened on New Year’s Eve in a performance hampered by colds and vocal problems. I caught the third performance, by which time the tenor Piotr Beczala was off convalescing and SeokJong Baek took his place as Radamés. (Beczala will be back on Friday.) Baek treated the role as an athletic challenge: His voice rang, his high notes pealed, and his diction was clear, but even in the aria “Celeste Aida” it was difficult to detect much tenderness for his supposed beloved. The character wrestles with the competing pressures of war and romance, but this warrior-lover didn’t project any doubts at all; killing and dying seemed much to his taste. The soprano Angel Blue, in her first crack at the title role, commanded more nuance and urgency, but she sometimes seemed less tragic than merely uncomfortable. A slight aluminum clank crept into her usually plush voice, and the words dissipated into strings of open-mouthed vowels. Judit Kutasi was a more persuasively vindictive Amneris, but her warm mezzo-soprano promised an emotional range that never materialized.
The only member of the cast who sounded truly Verdian was the baritone Quinn Kelsey as Aida’s father, the captive king Amonasro. This is one of the composer’s great paternal baritone roles: doting and demanding, warm yet principled, dads for whom the highest form of loyalty is the filial kind. Kelsey has sung others, such as Rigoletto and Germont in La Traviata, with style and sincerity. Here, he released each note like a Frisbee, soaring, spinning, and precisely targeted. He made sense of the text, reminding a muted audience that these characters are people too: Opera works better when you sing to your fellow cast members, rather than just walloping them with your big voice.
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