The Washington Post

HONS

Music Review - Pet Shop Boys

style jcole 

FILE PHOTO: The 66th Annual Grammy Awards in Los Angeles

handout

Illustration for style-coachellawinners

2024 iHeartRadio Music Awards - Show

Staff

Photo illustration of Taylor Swift overlayed with a blue and tan gradient. Tan polka dots surround her.

swift-poets-takeaways

FILES-ENTERTAINMENT-US-MUSIC-TAYLOR SWIFT

Contributor

FRANCE-US-MUSIC-TAYLOR SWIFT

Photographer

FILES-ENTERTAINMENT-US-MUSIC-WEALTH-TAYLOR SWIFT

Taylor Swift standing beside a rotating list of her track five songs: All Too Well, My Tears Ricochet, Dear John, and You're On Your Own Kid

taylorswifttrack5

Respond to prefers-color-scheme dark in app web views

Follow section front redirects in Spectrum

Enable NLP source in PCS for load testing

Switch off the News Alerts Survey Widget when we have enough responses

Poll to determine if new LUF updates are available

Allows the winning A/B test variant to be turned on without Spectrum deployment

Show infinite scrolling sections in Assembler MultiView

Show option for NLP article summaries in Action Bar

A general feature flag for Recipe Features that aren't yet released

Feature flag for media team features that aren't yet released

Use new Orca video player for preroll plugin in Spectrum

Show the snow tracker (instead of the heat tracker) on Spectrum

Stephen A. Smith would like even more of your attention

Wait, what is Stephen A. Smith talking about? Find out with our quiz.

Local sports networks go dark mid-game amid dispute with Comcast 

Election 2024 latest news: Biden holding events in battleground state of North Carolina

That time football legend, rig-driving eligible bachelor Biden was arrested

Campuses are grappling with the Gaza war. So are our columnists.

What’s the best bus to New York? We tested 5 for comfort and value.

Adaptive equipment is making national parks more inclusive

Southwest passengers now get a $75 voucher for big flight disruptions

Middle East conflict live updates: Hamas says it views talks favorably; Blinken urges group to accept deal

Money goes elsewhere, aid workers flee, Haitians endure on their own

Why the Solomon Islands election matters to China and the U.S.

Carolyn Hax: Will request for a postnup offend much younger wife?

Ask Sahaj: Responding to microaggressions is taking a toll on me. Can I stop?

Miss Manners: Offering my bedroom to guests

The beginner’s illustrated guide to watching an F1 race

Police arrest pro-Palestinian protesters at Columbia

Russian state media ramping up English, Spanish presence on TikTok, study finds

Microsoft is changing how you log in to your accounts

Apple is behind in AI and killed its self-driving car project. What’s next?

Trump and allies say Biden pays rent for ‘illegals’ in Michigan. Not true.

Eighty percent of Ukraine-Israel bill will be spent in U.S. or by U.S. military

Young Georgians want to be part of Europe. Their government is in the way.

Taxes are inevitable. Paying to prepare them doesn’t have to be.

A murder plot that cannot be ignored: India must come clean at last

Trevor Williams’s escape act helps Nationals blank Rangers 

How the Nationals helped Mitchell Parker develop into a big leaguer

The 33 best things to do in D.C. this weekend and next week

Cat climbed into Amazon return box, found alive 630 miles away

I learned to heal my sadness by cradling dying chickens 

Brave Little Hunter is free: Baby orca escapes lagoon for open seas

US President Joe Biden Departure

Scott Suchman

Washington National Opera launched its 68th season on Saturday with a bang — or, really, a haunting, distant boom.

The world premiere of “Grounded,” composer Jeanine Tesori’s operatic adaptation George Brant’s play, arrived last night to equal measure of anticipation and agita. Brant, who also wrote the libretto for the opera, made waves with his cutting one-woman show when it first landed in 2013, winning that year’s Edinburgh Fringe Festival.

The play centers on a 75-minute monologue by The Pilot, a nail-hard fighter pilot who, after an unexpected pregnancy, finds herself “grounded” by motherhood. Years later, she reenlists, but much to her dismay, rather than tearing through “the blue” in an F-16, she finds herself executing “Reaper” missions out of a trailer in Las Vegas. She’s flying drones — or as she calls it, joining the “Chair Force.”

Sharp. Witty. Thoughtful. Sign up for the Style Memo newsletter.

A small furor <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/02/arts/music/drone-opera-general-dynamics-washington.html" target=_blank>erupted online</a> earlier this year when details emerged about the operatic version of “Grounded,” which will open the Metropolitan Opera’s 2024-25 season. The listing of military contractor General Dynamics as a “presenting sponsor” on the WNO’s website drew early fire from critics, who lambasted the opera as military propaganda at best and war porn at worst — the latter due to the production’s teasing of high-tech visuals.

The WNO responded by adding a disclaimer to its ticket page: “For the sake of clarity, no sponsor or supporter of WNO had any involvement in the creation of ‘Grounded’ or in the contents of its libretto.”

It’s the kind of warning that braces you for a big impact. And while there’s plenty to be praised about two-time Tony-winner Tesori and Brant’s adaptation — the individual performances, the accommodating lyricism and surprising delicacy and daring of Tesori’s music, the inventive staging and orchestration — it’s an opera that seems (perhaps appropriately) distracted from its primary mission.

What’s changed about “Grounded” in its transition from play to opera? For one, The Pilot now has a name: Jess, brusquely and convincingly sung throughout with terse swagger, savage wit and compressed sensitivity by mezzo-soprano Emily D’Angelo. For another, she’s not flying solo: The impressive tenor Joseph Dennis is almost too powerful a voice for Jess’s naively needy rancher husband Eric; bass Morris Robinson embodied a commanding Commander; soprano Teresa Perrotta delivers a beguiling, pitch-bending turn as Also Jess — i.e. Jess’s dissociated self (an <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/music/fire-shut-up-in-my-bones-blanchard-met-opera/2021/09/28/a801cc2e-2057-11ec-b3d6-8cdebe60d3e2_story.html" target=_blank>opera</a> <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/music/eurydice-opera-met/2021/11/17/9dbdebde-45ab-11ec-b8d9-232f4afe4d9b_story.html" target=_blank>trend</a> almost as hot as <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/music/2023/03/30/anna-deavere-smith-walkers-proximity/" target=_blank>LED screens</a>).

There’s also now a Trainer (Frederick Ballentine), a “Hackers”-inspired co-worker named the Sensor (Kyle Miller), Jess’s young daughter Sam (the talented Willa Cook), an entire “Kill Chain” of voices heard singing orders through the scruffy signal of Jess’s headset, and a full male chorus of ghostly soldiers, their sturdy undergirding a musical highlight.

It’s unclear what, beyond strong voices, these extra bodies bring to the tale. Despite a powerfully forlorn aria in his casino uniform, Eric has all the depth of a deck of cards, and his chemistry with Jess is entirely entrusted to the music to convey. The presence of Sam, albeit sweet, seems more in service of softening us to Jess than softening Jess to anything. Everyone feels optional. In so many ways, “Grounded” remains a one-woman show.

Also new is director Michael Mayer’s staging, which disposes with the play’s minimalism in favor of Mimi Lien’s split-screen set: A raked upper deck of 300 interlocked LED panels constructed atop a more traditionally adaptable space.

The screens transform into a blue sky seen from a barrel-rolling jet, nightfall over a Wyoming ranch, a bank of bureaucratic fluorescents. But they also fill associative roles — the pink of a positive pregnancy test, the captivating galaxy of a sonogram, Jess’s paranoia over the mall’s surveillance cameras, the interface of her bombing console, the indistinguishable “gray putty” of her presumed targets. For a long and unsettling stretch, they offer gleaming renderings of the Reaper’s shiny surfaces that border on garish advertisement.

In the play, the expansive psychological and political stakes of the pilot’s crisis were contained (and intensified) by the staging’s stifling claustrophobia and its shifting suggestions — the thrill of the cockpit, the warmth of the womb, the chill of the prison cell.

Far less is left to the imagination here. And while opera is the art of overdoing, Mayer’s literal widescreen treatment broadens the scope of “Grounded” to the point where the target too often falls out of sight. (This isn’t helped by a runtime that nearly doubles that of the original 75-minute monologue.)

“Grounded” seems to want us to connect more deeply to Jess than we might have to the allegorical outline of The Pilot. It’s her humanity, after all, that causes glitches in her system and betrayals of her training; it’s her love for her daughter, we are wished to believe, that disarms her in several senses. But the opera grants us as clear a view of these developments as Jess has of her targets — it’s one big gray area for us to scan.

Which brings us to another unsettling aspect of “Grounded,” an opera about war and humanity that abstains until the last possible moment to (barely) humanize those on the receiving end of the Reaper’s wrath.

Metropolitan Opera general manager Peter Gelb has referred to “Grounded” as “an antiwar opera,” but it’s hard to understand what he means. Tesori’s music and Brant’s characters often seem to make light of the destruction they level. (The chorus performs a puzzlingly goofy slow-motion “boooom!” to indicate successful strikes.)

And unlike the mysterious form of The Pilot, Jess’s character — who longs to “light up” the world below — never quite earns our fascination or our sympathy (even when she snaps and does the “right” thing). Jess is a mess the whole time, her sudden redemption (and punishment) the cost of an unscheduled intrusion of humanity.

As remotely deployed carnage unfolds for all to see on cable news and social media, and as data reveals drone operators suffering from levels of PTSD comparable to their colleagues in the air, it’s difficult to look at drone warfare in 2023 as some lesser evil, or a chin-stroking abstraction. It’s even harder to consider it an element of someone’s personal identity crisis.

“Grounded” takes passing aim at the rigidity of gender, the weight of motherhood, the cost of freedom and the frailty of human connection, but it doesn’t seem to know its own enemy. War itself never finds its way into the crosshairs, and it feels like a miss.

Grounded runs through Nov. 13 at the Kennedy Center. <a href="https://www.kennedy-center.org/wno" target=_blank>kennedy-center.org/wno</a>

Emerson College, BFA in Creative Writing

Emerson College, MFA in Creative Writing

Michael Brodeur is a classical music critic at The Washington Post. 

Brodeur served as lead music critic and music editor at the Boston Phoenix before serving as an arts editor and cultural critic at the Boston Globe. 

Michael Andor Brodeur

“Grounded” never takes off in Washington National Opera premiere

the-washington-post

Arts & Entertainments

Power

The Media

Fashion

Of Interest

Style

washpost

prism://prism.query/arts-music-feed/&limit=20

Music

Music - The Washington Post

Coverage of music from The Washington Post. The latest headlines, breaking news, in-depth coverage and reviews of music.

prism://prism.query/site,/entertainment&limit=20

The latest news on entertainments and arts from The Washington Post. Breaking news and in-depth coverage of movies, music, tv, art, theater and video games.

prism://prism.query/ap-articles-by-site-id,/entertainment&limit=3

Style - The Washington Post

Style is the source for breaking news and trending topics on fashion, culture, and anything of interest. You’ll find in-depth coverage of the media and entertainment including the latest in movies, music and tv.