The Hours is a new opera with music by Kevin Puts and a libretto by Greg Pierce. Based on the novel of the same name by Michael Cunningham and its film adaptation, the production was chosen by star soprano Renée Fleming for her return to the Met stage. During the intermission interview, Puts and Pierce share that the piece was written almost entirely during lockdown, and shared their material and questions for each other via texts, calls, and emails. Fleming is joined onstage by mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato, and soprano Kelli O’Hara.
Act one starts strong with scenes featuring DiDonato as Virginia Woolf in 1923 working on her novel Mrs Dalloway; Fleming as Clarissa in the 1990s, preparing a dinner for her friend Richard, dying of AIDS; and the Metropolitan Opera chorus. Costumes by Tom Pye for the chorus have a startling dye job that, under the correct lighting, give the effect of the entire production being set underwater. However, the lighting changes from scene to scene, and the chorus never changes costume, leaving only a few further scenes in the remainder of the opera where the effect is again employed.
Puts’ score is most effective in its slower, lyrical sections, showcasing the Met Opera’s full orchestra. While not having heard any other work by Puts, the driving sections that propel the plot are typical of any other contemporary composer, i.e. Nico Muhly and John Adams, and not evocative of any personal style. Wind and string sections play highly rhythmic patterns that have slow harmonic changes, surely a nod to Philip Glass who scored the film version. The prelude to the first scene featuring Woolf is unfortunately scored for solo piano. It is both ineffective and jarring, barely able to accompany DiDonato’s rich voice by itself. The piano is brought back several times, and used for effect alongside the orchestra, to the detriment of the score as a whole.
It is in this scene when we are first introduced to Leonard Woolf played by the entirely miscast Sean Panikkar. Next to DiDonato, Panikkar looks like a hulking 7-foot-tall Adonis thirty years too young to play her husband. He had a pleasant tenor voice, but weak diction. Having to always share the stage with DiDonato also made it seem that his acting abilities were lacking, but I come up with a short list of other singers that could hold their own next to her.
Following this we are taken back to the 90s and treated to one of the two most striking scenes in the entire opera - the second is also in the 90s timeline, which is indicative. Clarissa is shopping for flowers and flirting with the owner, Barbara, played by Kathleen Kim. Kim has a fantastic coloratura voice and stage presence, put to great use by Puts who quotes several Mozart arias, a la Corgliano’s Ghosts of Versailles: the high Fs of the Queen of the Night enticing Clarissa to buy Ha-ha-ha-hydrangeas, and the final Pa-pa-pa-pa’s of Papagena for peonies. The entire chorus encircles them, bunches of flowers in both hands, the tableau bursting with colour and texture, reminding me of the framing of Mother Mary in the The Cell (2000) as well as the final shots of Midsommar (2019). My only complaint is that the bouquets could have been bigger and even more vibrant.
We are finally introduced to Kelli O’Hara’s Laura Brown in the 1950s, reading Mrs Dalloway in her bed, dreading to get up and greet her family on her husband’s birthday. This section came across as the weak link as the character had nonexistent motivations for her actions and a clichéd plot. How many stories in film and television have we already seen about a repressed housewife in the 1950s ready to buckle under the pressure of keeping the surface of her life glossy and clean? Brown feels no connection to her child and leaves him with a neighbour - also played by Kim - as she runs to a motel to kill herself with a bottle of pills. Her husband has done the irredeemable deed of buying her flowers and letting her sleep in on his birthday, and constantly showering their son with affection.
Kelly O’Hara’s acting was always visible, in the sense that it was constantly distracting to watch her and see her, for lack of a better term, go through the motions. Fleming and DiDonato in comparison seemed completely authentic. They were characters plucked from their lives and put on the stage, reacting to everything around them, and making choices and decisions moment to moment. There is something inexplicably off-putting about O’Hara’s performance, not even getting into the fact that the part is out of her grasp. The notes were there, of course, but the timbre of her voice was frequently strained, and not pleasant to listen to. Beside her co-stars there is a clearly audible gulf of technical proficiency between her and them.
Supporting the three leads is an ensemble of singers of mixed quality. Clarissa’s dying friend Richard is sung to perfection by bass-baritone Kyle Ketelsen. His rich voice could project at every dynamic, convey every emotion, and delivered every word with clear diction. His acting was also far better than most opera singers and met Fleming beat for beat, especially in the best scene of the entire opera where Clarissa visits Richard for one last time in his New York apartment. Clarissa’s partner Sally was played by Denyce Graves, whom I loved in Marnie, but sounded less than stellar in this live broadcast, every note uttered with a grating squawk.
In the 1950s Laura Brown’s husband delivered his lines serviceably, but not memorably. Her son was a a scene-stealer, and had a voice that projected loudly and clearly over the entire orchestra and chorus in the finale of Act 1. Back in the 20s, DiDonato is joined by another mezzo-soprano, Eve Gigliotti, playing the maid Nelly. From register to register Gigliotti’s voice was resonant and clear and I could only think of other parts I would love to hear her perform.
Finally, in another double-role, Sylvia D’Eramo plays Kitty in the 50s, and Woolf’s sister Vanessa in 1923. D’Eramo's voice seemed to belong to another singer, sounding more mature and full than her youthful looks would have you expect. She never took the focus away from O’Hara or DiDonato, but maybe should have been given the role of Brown instead. Next to O’Hara, D’Eramo was much more interesting to listen to and watch, and was able to play the young woman sharing a fleeting kiss with Brown, and mother to three as Vanessa.
There are two choices in this production that served no readily apparent purpose, and therefore failed in execution. First, a lone countertenor from the chorus singing wordlessly at the three leads throughout, the symbolism unclear if it had intention in the first place. Additionally, there is a dance cohort onstage for nearly the entirety of the production that serves no purpose other than to fill space, clutter the scenes with extra bodies, and brandish empty symbols of books, flowers, and kitchen appliances in the corresponding time periods. The oddest choice of all, to have one male dancer among the dozen or so women.
The set was disappointing and did not make use at all of the space and funds that the Met surely has at its disposal. Yet, in the second act there is one wow-element where a large silk screen comes billowing down from the ceiling and stretches right to the bottom of the stage to catch a set of black-and-white projections, a flashback with Clarissa and a young Richard on the beach, after which it is released and cascades to pool on the floor behind the singers. Again, it seems as the most care and attention is made for Fleming’s 1990s scenes.
Throughout the opera there is a reference to Richard’s book being great, but suffering from a ‘tacked-on’ ending. Ironically, this opera also suffers from the same fate. The finale is a chance for the leading women to shed their characters - none does so faster than O’Hara - adjusting their body language, and gazing directly into the audience, to address us in a trio containing only a handful of sentences, repeated ad nauseum with nearly no melodic variation, ‘Here is the world and you live in it. All alone. You try.’ I couldn’t tell if it was supposed to be sentimental, uplifting, melancholy, or what, but ultimately it comes across as smarmy. Richard Strauss this is not, despite Fleming and co. giving it their all.
