Nixon in China, Metropolitan Opera HD Live, March 2 2011

I had expected light attendance, what with this being an “encore” performance of a modern opera, but there must have been 50 people at our local theater. You brave opera lovers, you!

This was the first time that the Met had presented Nixon in China, even though the opera was premiered 24 years ago (at the Houston Grand Opera). To my mind, they need not have been in such a hurry. The music, by John Adams, was moderately interesting and never offensive. However, the libretto by Alice Goodman struck me as silly and pointless. Nixon arrives on Air Force One: well, that has some dramatic potential. Nixon meets the aged Mao in the latter’s study: yawn. The Americans and Chinese toast each other at a banquet: yawn. Pat Nixon visits a glass factory and a pig farm: yawn. The Red Detachment of Women as a ballet: ballets in the middle of an opera are a time-honored tradition. The characters reflect on what has/has not been accomplished during the visit: well, not much. Nobody dies. Nobody falls in love. Sort of like Hell as a place of unrelieved boredom.

The staging was by Peter Sellars, who among other avant-garde notions has set Cosi fan tutte in a Florida diner. The first act and the first half of the second act went reasonably well. The front half of Air Force One (with its large nose wheel) lands as a cardboard cutout descending from on high; Nixon walks down the stairway and greets his hosts. In Mao’s study, the characters stand or sit in easy chairs. Mao is hardly able to walk, and is assisted by a woman on each side of him. (An interesting anecdote from an intermission interview with Winston Lord, who was there in 1972: “We couldn’t tell whether Mao was being deeply philosophical or was just being senile.”)
Scene 3 featured three gigantic circular banquet tables. In Act 2, scene 1 is performed with much moving around of stage props to represent the glass factory, the pig farm (with a smallish plastic big), etc. Scene 2, with The Red Detachment of Women, is where things veer wildly off course. Henry Kissinger leaves his seat, gets up on stage (here, the right half of the Met stage), and molests one of the women performers. In Act 3 we see half a dozen simple beds with white sheets lined up from left to right, the feet of the beds facing us. After a segment with Mr. and Mrs. Nixon, Mao comes in, sits on the edge of his bed, and one of the women who supported him in the Mao’s study scene rubs his crotch for an extended period of time, with a perfectly blank look on her face. That’s when the picture in the theater went away. Five minutes later, the sound went away. Five minutes later, everyone (well, everyone who was left, after a certain amount of attrition at the intermissions) was getting a complimentary pass to a future movie. I have to hand it to the Pleasant Hill theater: when something goes wrong, they do their best to make up for it.

Our cast:
Richard Nixon: James Maddalena
Pat Nixon: Janis Kelly
Henry Kissinger: Richard Paul Fink
Mao Tse-Tung: Robert Brubaker
Chou En-lai: Russell Braun
Chiang Ch'ing: Kathleen Kim
Conductor: John Adams

Of these, Richard Paul Fink was the standout, with a hefty, authoritative baritone. But he couldn’t redeem the remainder of the production. A delta. Perhaps a different production, which we will see in San Francisco next year, will improve my attitude. I hope so.