Emilia Marty, queen of the blase, totally self­absorbed but fabulously magnetic: I guess the Met management thought Norman could just play herself. But she has no self to play; when you've stylized your offstage life into performance art, what is left to do on stage? Asking La Norman to play so arch a character is severe overkill, like directing Bruce Willis to do smartass or Meryl Streep to play quirky or Sylvester Stallone to act dumb. She layered mannered upon mannered: it was like watching the Statue of Liberty in the role of Mildred Pierce. The soprano's strongest onstage quality is a sort of monumentality, a goddess persona that renders her fascinating as Didon or Cassandre or Stravinsky's Jocasta, even, to a lesser extent, as Ariadne, but she's just too lofty, too inhuman, too much for most of the repertoire, including this role. Like other classic "femmes fatales" (e.g., Lulu, Kundry, Poppea, and, going farther afield, the great Dietrich and Garbo film roles) Marty is written cold and distant; it's the performer's task to complicate the character by playing the fire inside the iceberg, to warm her up with honest emotion. Maralin Niska did just that, I am told, at the New York City Opera's celebrated 1970s revival of this work; so, apparently, did Anja Silja at Glyndebourne last summer. Ms. Norman seems unwilling to reveal anything but a glistening marmoreal surface; no matter how striking, it cannot hold our interest for long. 

And Marty is a hard sing: the vocal line is wide­ranging and declamatory; besides, the character is practically never off stage. Norman chose to "talk­sing" most of the time, which in the first two acts is not such a bad idea: her diction was generally clear if forbiddingly elocutionary ("Geev me the ahnveloope.") She did not rise to the challenge of the killer final scene, with its long and arching Straussian phrases. Coming at the end of a long evening, this finale is a formidable test of any performer's stamina, not least because the dramatic situation requires Emilia to abandon her carefully manicured self­control as she rapturously embraces death. Janacek's musico­dramatic intention is clear: as Emilia achieves greatness of spirit, at last she can truly sing. Obviously, then, it's not a moment you can finesse. After a whole night of carefully husbanding her resources, Ms. Norman ran out of voice midway through the scene, curtailing or faking the high­lying phrases. Her contortions of face and body suggested not so much a world­weary woman throwing off the shackles of unwanted immortality as an exhausted singer calculating her odds of finishing the performance. Ms. Norman has preserved the celebrated bronze richness of her middle and lower registers, but everything above the staff is strictly hit­or­miss: often well below the pitch and devoid of thrust or color. It is not surprising the soprano has severely curtailed her operatic activities: roles befitting her star status are simply too demanding for her current vocal estate. I predict she will move into the Astrid Varnay repertoire: look for Norman's first Klytemnaestra within five years. 

(Given her obvious unsuitablity for the role of Emilia, I really cannot understand why Ms. Norman was cast in the first place. The world hardly lacks for competent interpreters of the part: Ms. Silja, Dame Gwyneth Jones, Josephine Barstow, Hildegard Behrens, Catherine Malfitano and Raina Kabaivanska all currently include this role in their repertoire.)

Perhaps in an attempt to compensate for their star's discomfort in the central role, the production team gave her the kind of full­out glamour treatment Glenn Close got in Sunset Boulevard: lavish gowns and wigs, emphatic lighting, splashy stage business (a mammoth billboard of the diva's brooding visage loomed behind the windows of the sets for Acts One and Three); she even received a program credit as co-librettist! Her costumes ("executed by Barbara Matera, Ltd." which I take to mean the diva vetoed Dona Granata's designs) are flattering and quite grand: Ms. Norman looks just like Ms. Norman, only rather more so. In her Act One street ensemble of crushed­velvet swing coat, toque, and catglasses, Jessye could pass for Queen Latifah. I thought the gold­lame caftan and turban Marty wore for Act Two looked awfully familiar and I was right: Jessye models something very like it on the cover of her Sheherezade CD. But the gayest drag of the night was Emilia Marty's pre­Raphaelite tea gown for the finale, just the thing for self­immolation­­ sort of Norma meets Christian Lacroix. Lighting effects and staging were also calculated to distance the leading lady from the rest of the cast, presumably to emphasize Marty's isolation from humanity. A cool idea on paper, but in practice it only emphasized La Norman's already chilly rapport with her fellow singers: she came off like a soap star slumming at a slightly disreputable dinner theater. 

All three leading men were more or less miscast. Graham Clark, for all his keen intelligence and obviously passionate commitment, lacked the heft and breadth of voice for Gregor (it calls for a James King); he is, moreover, simply too wired a performer to be believable as a bored rich boy: he needs to stick to mad geniuses and kinky aristocrats. Besides, he is a head shorter than Ms. Norman: their scenes together were elaborate exercises in concealing this potentially embarrassing contrast. Hakan Hagegard, conversely, lacked menace as Prus. This character should be a modern­dress Scarpia; the Swedish baritone came off more like Papageno with a hangover. Donald McIntyre would have made more sense in this role: instead, his intense presence and granite bass­baritone were misplaced on the literal­minded Dr. Kolenaty. 

Anthony Laciura was perfect, though, for the cameo role of Hauk, a part that has "ham" written all over it; as expected, he stopped the show with his brief Act 2 scene. Marie Plette and William Burden were fresh­voiced and attractive young lovers, though they seemed to be directed to play gloom and doom instead of callow enthusiasm­­ surely a mistake. Ms. Plette showed enormous couth (and more than a little decolletage) in the RuPaul getup Ms. Granata designed for Act Two, and Mr. Burden deserves our sympathetic admiration for the dignified way he performed that bizarre and potentially embarrassing entrance from the auditorium­­ and for his debut yet! (I still haven't figured out what that was all about.) A special word of praise to Ara Berberian, who turned four or five lines into a fully­realized and engaging character. 

Well, I've tapdanced around the issue as long as I can: this Elijah Moshinsky production sucks. Character blocking seems to matter little to this producer­­ the singers, reduced to mere props in his visual scheme, stood, slouched or sat before stylized backdrops, their positions on stage unrelated to the dramatic action. Against a vast wall of filing cabinets, a massive set­piece sphinx on an empty opera stage, and a creepy new­money hotel suite, he posed his chicly­costumed performers as though he were styling a shoot for Vogue. Everything moving or exciting about the opera was sacrificed to Moshinsky's quest for "images." At the end of Act One, Ms. Norman and Mr. Clark's valiant attempt to play an emotionally complex love scene was literally overshadowed by an intricate "film noir" lighting design that flattered the brooding set but obscured the performers' faces. The myriad light cues and set changes for Act Two needlessly confused an already complicated series of brief scenes. 

But the Act Three finale was by far the most disastrous of Moshinsky's transgressions. He pushed the cast downstage and dropped in the show curtain, forcing the heroine to play out her final aria "in one." The huge Met proscenium dwarfed Ms. Norman just at the moment her character must command the stage, and the radiant transfiguration music was interrupted by the noise of scenery shifting. Then, ignoring the simple but very effective stage directions for the finale (Kristina burns the Makropulos document, Emilia collapses, curtain), Moshinsky interpolated an irrelevant special effect: Ms. Norman's billboard exploded (well, actually, "fizzled" is more like it) as the diva lurched offstage. Huh? What the fuck is that supposed to mean­­ when a star dies, her PR dies with her? Since when is the destruction of outdoor advertising a metaphor for the end of eternal life? The audience, puzzled by this clumsy magic trick, had to refer to their programs to figure out the end of the story. (It is symptomatic of Moshinsky's "effects without causes" aesthetic that the opening scene­­ the ladder business that led to the death of Richard Versalle a week earlier­­ could be so easily restaged for Thursday night's performance. Nothing was lost by leaving Ronald Naldi safely on ground level; like so many of the producer's ideas, the scene was striking but meaningless. 

Makropulos Case is the latest installment in a series of "daring" new Met productions (see also Jonathan Miller's Pelleas et Melisande and Graham Vick's Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk), whose reliance on postmodern cliche render them as dated as power suits and cocaine. In particular, Moshinsky's Avant Garde Lite ("Looks Great, Less Meaning") style reminds me of that passe brand of interior decoration that produces a gorgeous but inhospitable room. You know, those places that look so great in Architectural Digest, but no one could actually live there, or, to put it more bluntly, the kind of apartment where the guy you're fucking keeps yelling, "Stay on the towel!" Moshinsky's stage pictures are similarly inhospitable, as if he were afraid real drama might leave Crisco stains on the carpet. Like so many other "name" producers, he seems unwilling to accept the convention that stage direction, like conducting or singing, is a discipline of interpretation, not creation. An interpreter's first and most vital duty is to remain faithful to the artistic intentions of the true creator, in this case the composer. To accept this "limitation" requires a certain humility and willingness to compromise that may be alien to the mindset of so celebrated an artist as Mr. Moshinsky. Well, if that is so; if the works of Strauss, Verdi, Tchaikovsky and Janacek do not afford Mr. Moshinsky sufficient opportunity to exercise his exquisite aesthetic sensibility, I suggest he write his own opera. 

David Robertson understands his duty as a conductor and will, I think, make a valuable addition to the Met's roster. He shaped the spiky orchestral lines with authority and grace, rising to poetic heights in the final pages of the opera. I myself prefer a softer­focus reading, but Robertson made a convincing case for his interpretation. I admire particularly the sensitive way he adapted his approach to his leading lady's limitations: some people I know (no names!) would have shown far less consideration. Mr. Robertson deserves extravagant praise merely for showing up after the horrific events of the past week; beyond that we should thank him with all our hearts for doing his job so well. In fact, he won a warm round of applause for his efforts; the production team, on the other hand, refrained from taking their traditional first­performance curtain call. Now, you tell me what that means. 

James Jorden is the editor of parterre box, the queer opera zine.