Back in April 2015, at downtown Manhattan’s Public Theater, George Brant’s Grounded proved a powerful one-woman showcase for actress Anne Hathaway. For 85 minutes, in the intimate confines of the Public’s 275-seat Anspacher Theater, the audience was tightly gripped by the up-close-and-personal narrative of a nameless Air Force fighter pilot who, “grounded” by pregnancy, winds up firing drone-carried missiles at Middle Eastern targets from the exceedingly remote distance of a chair in a Nevada trailer.
Nine and a half years later, Brant’s play – described as “taut” and “terse” by Charles Isherwood of The New York Times – has become an opera, the words still his but the story vastly opened up, set to music by the two-time Tony-winner Jeanine Tesori. Transplanted uptown to the 3,850-seat Metropolitan Opera House, it now spreads over two acts and two hours and twenty minutes, intermission included. Characters merely spoken of in the play are now onstage singing, and there’s a male chorus, a full orchestra and plenty of eye-popping visuals and ear-splitting sound effects. Carrying a ton or two of excess weight, the once taut and terse Grounded has been, well, grounded.
I’ve admired Tesori’s work on Broadway – Caroline, or Change left a strong imprint and the couldn’t-be-more-different Shrek the Musical was a total delight. In fact, I felt the new Grounded might have worked better as a musical, with spoken dialogue in place of its full-tilt, mostly unintelligible narrative passages and with discrete “numbers” – songs, duets, choruses – each with a profile of its own. But the Met commissioned the opera and pulled out all the stops for it, as it invariably does these days when presenting contemporary works. It’s a sad fact, however, that the Met is simply the wrong house for nearly all of those pieces – a supersized behemoth that does no favors for even the grandest of the nineteenth-century grand operas. This Grounded offered none of the intimacy that so distinguished the play downtown. It couldn’t have.
What it did offer was the Met’s coming-of-age present to a Lindemann Young Artist Program alumna who’s graduated to a major international career. As Jess – the opera gives her a name – Emily D’Angelo is onstage for 99 per cent of the show in a role that has to be as testing vocally as it is physically: most of the singing comes in various degrees of forte. She clearly has stamina, and her warm, dark, pliant mezzo-soprano does all Tesori asks it to do. She’s a fine actress, too, with a strong stage presence. I’m not blaming her that the words often didn’t register clearly. At the final curtain, with the audience roaring its acclaim, one thing was perfectly clear: the Met has a new star.
Photo Credit: Ken Howard, Met Opera
Emily D’Angelo as Air Force pilot Jess in Grounded
Isherwood’s Times review of the play noted that “[director Julie] Taymor has provided a sleek, high-tech production to surround [Hathaway],” and on a massive scale the Met’s Michael Mayer has done the same for D’Angelo, assisted by an expert six-person design team: Mimi Lien (sets), Tom Broecker (costumes), Kevin Adams (lighting), Jason H. Thompson and Kaitlyn Pietras (projections), and Palmer Hefferan (sound). All seemed to have the same goal: make things Met-sized – BIG! The bottom half of Lien’s two-level set was a welcome exception that effectively captured the relative smallness of Jess’s domestic life.
It was those scenes that I liked best, the intimate ones on the home front away from the mounting pressures of Jess’s twelve-hour shifts on the Air Force’s “kill chain,” and that brought out the best in Tesori. Tenor Ben Bliss as Eric, the Wyoming rancher Jess marries, anchored these scenes beautifully, their tender quiet a happy respite from the decibel count above. D’Angelo softened notably here, her love for husband and child (charming second-grader Lucy LoBue) achingly palpable.
Ellie Dehn’s soprano was welcome too, when, as “Also Jess” duetting with her increasingly conflicted self, she added another female singing voice to the otherwise fully male mix. On the upper level, there was fine work from baritone Kyle Miller as the Sensor and bass-baritone Greer Grimsley as the Commander. The chorus sang powerfully, and in the pit Yannick Nézet-Séguin led Tesori’s score with the care and conviction he habitually brings to Met novelties.
Overall though, Grounded the opera stubbornly kept me stuck in my seat in row Q, when I longed to be, like Jess in her F-16 Flying Falcon, soaring aloft into “the blue.”
Editor’s Note: For those of you who can’t make it to New York, Grounded will be part of the Met’s Live in HD series in cinemas this year, playing on October 19, 2024. Check your local listings for time.
Photo Credit: Ken Howard, Met Opera
Ben Bliss, Emily D’Angelo and Lucy LoBue in the tender, happy respite from the Air Force in Grounded
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Patrick Dillon, a native Detroiter, grew up with Canada just across the river, and later launched his career as a classical-music journalist at The Globe and Mail. Now a longtime New Yorker, he’s lucky enough to live just across Broadway from the Met.
