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At Antony and Cleopatra, the Music and Dancers Own the Show
I sometimes wished the singers would stop getting in the way of that lovely score.
That’s partly because Adams has developed such a distinctive vocal style, a mixture of unfussy American diction and proclamatory aloofness, that the singers all sound more like his creations than they do their separate characters. Antony and Cleopatra’s benighted love story plays out against the surge of Roman power, and Caesar, sung with biting clarity by Paul Appleby, comes off as a modern Duce. In an interview in the program, Pulitzer gives this ancient story a distinctively contemporary gloss: Antony and Cleopatra are emblems of diversity; “Caesar is a nationalist fascist leader and is seeking to eradicate other cultures.” To her, she explains, “this piece is about the transformative power of love to create a world that embraces difference.” That interpretation flips Adams’s opera on its head, since military disaster nearly extinguishes their passion and his-and-hers suicides clear the way for Roman conquest.
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