Stephanie, Karen, and I saw *Grounded* at the Met on Oct 2, 2024.
It had its premiere at Washington National Opera last year, this is the Met premiere. It opened the season, the first time an opera by a woman has opened the season. The composer is Jeanine Tesori - - this is her fourth opera but the first I've seen, she's best known as a composer of musicals. I've seen quite a few of her shows: *Violet,* *Thoroughly Modern Millie,* *Caroline, or Change,* *Fun Home,* and *Kimberly Akimbo.* The last three on that list are amazing works of theatre. She has an impressive ability to use music to further the story and to create character through vocal writing. I knew that both those skills would serve her very well as an opera composer. The libretto is by playwright George Brant, adapted from his one-woman play.
The opera is about a fighter pilot who feels most alive and at home when she's in the air. She's serving in Iraq at the start of the story, then goes on leave in Wyoming and has a one-night stand with a rancher. Surprise surprise, she gets pregnant, moves to Wyoming, and marries him.
She takes five years off to raise her daughter and then goes back to her commanding officer in the Air Force, asking to be deployed. He tells her there's no place for her as a pilot anymore. Her new assignment is operating a missile-carrying drone in Afghanistan from a remote base outside of Las Vegas. The bulk of the opera is about her uneasiness no longer working as a pilot (she says she's now in the "Chair Force") and trying to balance her job with her relationships with her husband and daughter.
The opera opened with a quiet moment for the central character, Jess. Within a minute or two a curtain rose to reveal the upper half of the stage - - literally the upper half, a platform suspended over the stage floor - - with the male chorus and a handful of male dancers wearing flight suits and standing in a dynamic formation. The platform was splashed with video projections depicting clouds. We soon realized these men weren't just pilots, they were also planes. This thrilling stage image, paired with the coursing music, inspired many in the audience to applaud. It's standard practice for an opera audience to applaud a singer, an aria, or another moment in the music and I've often heard an opera audience applaud a set but this was the first time I've heard an opera audience applaud the STAGING.
The music was generally very good. It was a treat to see a new opera that had stand-alone arias and duets, opportunities for the music to stop and the audience to applaud. That's old school and I love it. Jess was sung by a young Canadian mezzo named Emily D'Angelo and she knocked me out. She has as gorgeous voice, she's an intelligent singer, and she's an engaged performer. I'd love to see her in a more standard rep piece - - I saw in the program that she's singing Octavian in *Der Rosenkavalier* at various places around the world, I'd love for the Met to cast her in that role.
Here she is singing her first act aria, "Blue:"
I'd heard tenor Ben Bliss in *Cosi fan tutte.* He sang well in that show but I hated the staging so much I left at intermission and didn't get to hear his big aria in the second act. He was wonderful in this as Jess's husband. He had the most tender music of the show. Stephanie heard echoes of *Oklahoma!* and *Carousel,* which are entirely appropriate. He deftly managed the balance between singing that Americana style music in an authentic way without forgetting he was in an opera.
The high point of the show for me was the start of the second act. Jess and her daughter are at the mall. The chorus is onstage playing people who work at Cinnabon or whatever. Jess is buying a dress for her daughter for picture day and becomes derailed by all of the security cameras looking at her. Director Michael Mayer took the camera footage and projected it onto the stage, a surreal touch that cranked up the drama. The juxtaposition of Cinnabon / little girl in a pink sparkly dress and Jess's interior terror made exterior, it was a profound and complicated moment that totally delivered and so easily could have gone wrong. It's the only *Twilight Zone* moment I can remember seeing in an opera - - it was audacious and it paid off.
Stephanie's sister-in-law thought the second act of the opera was less satisfying because it's a psychodrama, the conflict is inside of Jess's mind. That's a little removed for an opera audience, we're used to more blood, guts, and overt passion.
I feel I should mention that the performance we saw was very sparsely attended, I would guess it was 20-30% sold. The problem is that the Met has to plan their seasons five or six years in advance. They had a big success with *Akhnaten* in 2019 and another Philip Glass opera, *Satyagraha,* a few years before. Those operas brought in big audiences, younger audiences, and they thought they'd come back for other new work. It hasn't quite panned out that way, at least not every time. Personally, I'm thrilled that they're doing so much contemporary opera. The six operas that Stephanie and I chose this season are heavy in that direction: four contemporary operas and two by Richard Strauss. That's totally my jam.
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