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At the Met, Moby-Dick Gets Rendered Down
Jake Heggie’s and Gene Scheer’s opera adaptation goes easy on the meaty conflicts and keeps the stakes curiously low.
Moby-Dick, an opera by librettist Gene Scheer and composer Jake Heggie has been performed widely enough (in Dallas, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Washington) since its 2010 premiere that it qualifies as a semi-classic, and Leonard Foglia’s production, too, arrives well-used. On opening night, the confident cast—Brandon Jovanovich as Ahab, Steven Costello as Greenhorn (you can call him Ishmael), and Thomas Glass stepping in for Peter Mattei as Starbuck—made a round-the-world voyage on a leaky hunk of carpentry sound a bit too easy. Melville’s Moby-Dick is a profoundly physical book, and his sentences haul parlor-bound readers into a world of swinging spars, slippery decks, bone-deep terror, the musky smell of whales, and the vertigo of obsession.
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