Medea at the Met

The Met’s opening night production of Cherubini's "Medea" played to the house's strengths: putting great singers in comfortable surroundings and letting them do their thing. Medea is ripe for more thoughtful interrogation than this McVicar joint could provide, but this was undoubtedly the right vehicle for the company's star-driven opening night and it came off splendidly. 

The superstar at the center, Sondra Radvanovsky, delivered all the big-time Medea one could ask for, serving utter command of the stage but also depth of characterization and attention to detail. Radvanovsky does not deliver CD-perfect sound on stage but the vocal excitement and awe she can create is far more important, and any idiosyncrasies were easily folded into the character. Besides the vocal demands, this is a treacherous acting assignment for a singer. Maintaining a feverish emotional pitch through I dunno, 10 - 20 oaths of revenge, may be the easy part—Medea must also sell whiplash turns of emotion and maintain audience interest through long monologues that rest entirely on the lead. Radvanovsky made all of this highly engaging.

This is also a production that does not provide a lot of distractions from its lead. The last/first time I saw Medea onstage was in Simon Stone's utter waste of a production at the Salzburg festival pre-pandemic. Stone's fussy, hyper-realistic take (sorry now I'm going to complain about this old production) constructed elaborate modern-dress scenarios which buried the leads under so much cinematic detail that most scenes were already done by the time you had figured out how the text fit to the scenario you were observing.

McVicar, working with a straightforward unit set showing the walls of Crete which open to reveal the inside of the palace, mostly just lets the leads play the scenes in front of a static set, which I was very grateful for, at least this time around. A few bits were pushed too far—Medea slithering around on the floor when she initially crashes the wedding didn’t need to go on for so long, some of the upstage tableaux, like Glauce’s gory demise, overstayed their welcome, and Medea’s interpretive movement under the Act III prelude was too on the nose. Least forgivable was the choice to have Medea curl up with the corpses of her children at the end, even though the libretto clearly states she has gone down to the river. Blocking that so clearly contradicts the text needs a good rationale but it was hard to find a justification besides injecting a bit of sympathy for this…checks notes…*vengeful child murderer* in the last seconds of the show. But mostly this was a non-interventional production that just worked.

Elsewhere in the cast: it feels odd to say Polenzani didn't "stand out" but that is the fate of basically everyone who is not Medea in this show. He was absolutely Radvonovsky's equal in their ensemble work, especially the big duet that ends Act I. The show makes you wait perhaps a bit too long before Medea shows up and by 30 minutes in you could feel the audience's attention starting to wander a bit. I assume that was Cherubini's plan all along, because if the Medea-Jason duet comes off the way Radvonovsky-Polenzani delivered it the audience collectively kicks itself for being doubters just moments later. Polenzani shines in this heavier rep by maintaining much of the delicious pingy sound familiar from his Mozart days, though here he sounded a tad shouty and careless at times. Despite having his cake and eating it too at the outset of the plot, Polenzani’s Jason was almost as bedraggled and sulky as Medea, never letting the audience forget that he has been compromised and brutalized by tragedy as well. 

Michele Pertusi was an imposing Creon, perfectly sitting in that intersection of gravitas and vocal luxury that one expects in supporting authority figures at the Met. I complained last week about how the dad in Rossini's Otello was cast with a perfectly pleasant young artist which cost the dynamic between Desdemona and her father some credibility. Pertusi's imposing father neatly validated that observation a few days later. I know there are economics at work here for smaller companies and getting young artists exposure in these roles is important, but companies should think about the impact as well.

Janai Brugger was a luminous Glauce reaching just a bit at the top of her otherwise very satisfying Act I showpiece. Ekaterina Grubovna’s Neris was gorgeously sung, but I grew a bit distracted in her major Act II aria.