After today’s Met dress rehearsal of The Enchanted Island, La Cieca’s spy (pictured) reports: “You would think that if they had the entire Baroque canon to mine, they would’ve chosen music that wasn’t slow, dull, and long.  In Peter Gelb‘s opening remarks, he called it ‘the Met’s Baroque Coming Out party,’ which makes me think this entire endeavor was to introduce new audiences to Baroque opera—and if that’s the case, they chose a poor way of trying to win them over.”

“I heard that a bunch of cuts had been put back in, at William Christie‘s demand, as recently as this week. and so the show just drags on and on and on repeating lyrics. There are probably three or four upbeat numbers in the whole show; all the rest feel like dirges.”

“The whole Hermia/Demetrius/Helena/Lysander subplot thing just came across as ill-conceived and dragged time in the opposite direction.  The libretto is clunky and very, very repetitious, not to mention numerous lines that contradict what the singer has just stated, especially for Placido Domingo‘s character. It feels slapdash, hurried: there’s no poetry in any of the words.  

“The first act is so terribly slow and dull that by the time you get to the end of it, when Placido has his first entrance, the audience applauded it because until then, nothing really had happened, and because he’s famous.  Unfortunately, he still doesn’t know his music and had to rely on a very audible prompter (whom I heard from the balcony) which is sad, because he has the least amount of music in the show, save Ferdinand.

“The sets and costumes are the highlights, hands down.

“In a few moments, Joyce DiDonato devoured the set– she hammed it up more than anyone else. Danielle DeNiese‘s coloratura in the Scarlatti Handel aria in act 1 was a disaster, but her 11 o’clock aria was fairly well executed. Layla Claire, Anthony Costanzo, and Luca Pisaroni gave the best performances, followed by Joyce and David Daniels.”