The Met orchestra struck up The Star-Spangled Banner. It is a venerated tradition to sing the American national anthem – adopted in the US as recently as 1931 – at the opening of the Met season. The Lincoln Center’s 3,800 capacity crowd rose as one and sang its heart out.
Suddenly, behind me in the Dress Circle, it seemed the whole female section of Salt Lake City’s Mormon Tabernacle Choir had snuck in.
At the first verse drama line, a real risk of being blown from Row C to the front stalls emerged. “What so proudly we hailed“. Hailed? Overwhelmed more like.
Turned out we had been joined in the back three rows by a wound-up ladies’ church chorus from the Upper East Side. From alto to contralto, these gals were on a mission.
As a courteous guest in the country I admire so much, I la-la’d along, as vigorously as was seemly, latching onto the odd, remembered phrase, wishing the damned thing was as simple as “God Save the King”. I should know it by now. The Star-Spangled Banner, that is.
After negotiating the Styx of three stanzas of complexity, via the occasional stepping stone of a resounding phrase, like “perilous fight, I, la-la’d out, struggled ashore on the far bank of familiarity and gave it laldy.
“O say, does that Star-Spangled Banner in triumph still wave,
O’er the Land of the free and the home of the Brave.“
Phew! Know that bit. As we sat down, my guest for the evening smiled weakly, courteously pretending not to have noticed my absurd antics.
Having scaled those dizzy heights of patriotism, curtain up. We were grounded. With a bump. Grounded is a commission from the Met, score by American composer Jeanine Tesori, words from librettist George Brant, based on his 2013 same name play. It is a contemporary story of aerial warfare, fighter planes, drones and – The Reaper. The ultimate scary weapon you never know is lurking above. Until, “Boom”! There were to be plenty of those.
This is a story about America’s attempts to wave that star-spangled banner over lands far from free, Iraq and Afghanistan. Jess, the heroine, first appears as a totally committed F16 pilot, fixated by her “Tiger”, riding up, up and away into the blue sky and raining down explosive justice on unseen enemies.
Back on leave in Wyoming, she meets a local rancher, Eric, in a bar, admires his pluck in challenging her fellow, male Air Force comrades, then deftly defusing the potentially nasty situation by that traditional device – “Boys, the drinks are on me”. Works every time in cowboy western movies. Why not Francis E. Warren Air Force Base, Cheyenne, Wyoming?
Two Americas meet. Jess’ limitless horizon of blue sky where she dodges missiles, flak, and tracer in the cause of freedom, and Eric’s endless horizon of Wyoming Territory, still offering the golden possibilities of the 19th century pioneering push West.
Two Americas fall in love. After a quick snog, the couple enjoy a one-night stand, the starry Wyoming sky standing in as metaphor for copulation. Jess becomes pregnant. They marry.
In the opening scenes, Brant’s tone is set. Knife-like lyrics, peppered with profanities. There are expletives, raining down on the audience like Hellfire missiles. “What the f**k?’, ‘Holy sh*t!”. Usually the punchline to a clever joke. Gratuitous? Not really. Profanity with a purpose. Repeated “Booms!” when the bad guys get it.
Best joke. When Eric takes Jess out of the bar, he promises to show her Wyoming’s beautiful sights. She responds archly, “If I notice them, you’re clearly doing something wrong”. Naughty!
Post coitus, Jess looks at Eric’s body and muses she has seen everything in Wyoming she needed to see. The audience fell about laughing. Having visited Jackson Hole, Wyoming in August – remember that secret mission? More in November! – I am slightly disappointed to report that I did not see everything I needed to see. A return to Jackson Hole beckons.
Welcome light relief in a work focused on the horrors of modern warfare and those frequent “Booms!” announcing the flash death of enemies below. Brant knew he needed to vary the mood in a work that otherwise risked becoming a doom fest. Just as Da Ponte lightened Don Giovanni’s dark sexual predations with Leporello’s famous “List” aria.
Jess becomes pregnant, has a daughter, Sam, marries Eric and stays home for five years. This libretto doesn’t hang about.
Sharp stagecraft is key. Michael Mayer, the Director in charge of production, is more accustomed to Broadway and understands dramatic impact. The set is on two levels. Jess’ war world on top, Eric’s homey Wyoming below.
No clunky scene changes required. We are transported instantly from one to the other through a wormhole of lighting effects, provided by Tony Adams, another Broadway, Tony award winner. Tesori is also best known for her Broadway shows, about a dozen to her credit, and one other opera, Blue, about New York cops, which I disliked. Too preachy.
The Broadway genes had some of my friends in the Metropolitan Opera Club musing that, really, Grounded, is a musical rather than an opera. I think it arguably has a place in either arena. Leonard Bernstein fathered that ambiguity in his 1957 West Side Story.
With fewer set-piece standalone choreographed sequences than most musicals I have seen, Grounded teeters, and falls on the opera side of the fence. Maybe a distinction without a difference. End the debate! Whichever it is, Grounded is gripping, its score enfolding.
Jess is happy at home, inspecting those aspects of Wyoming she had previously ignored, but pines to return to those limitless skies. Her Commander, sung in a wonderfully choleric style by the aptly named veteran bass-baritone Greer Grimsley, tells her it’s not on. Jess is horrified to learn her beloved F16 which caressed her into the Blue has become a dinosaur.
She is forced to enter the world of drone warfare, cooped up in a trailer on a remote base outside Las Vegas, sitting, surrounded by screens, with a 19-year-old nerd “gamer”, Sensor. Welcome home – to the “Chair-Force”.
At this point, Set Designer, Mimi Lien came into her own. As Commander tells Jess the facts of post pregnant Air Force life, the top-level backdrop screen slowly fills with the image of an advancing Reaper drone, until, from stage right to left, it dominates the scene. The HD clarity is stunning. It’s coming to get you. Scary.
Lien has a storied history in – yup, Broadway. The canted upper level, populated by well-choreographed F16 pilots, swaying to the movements of a fighter in close combat in the opening scenes, gives way to the techno world of remote warfare.
A view of the ground from a drone eye in the sky and the instrument green of instruments, shifting horizons, all controlled by a joystick manipulated by La-Z-Boy warriors.
Readers unfamiliar with the La-Z-Boy way of life should be aware it is the favoured home furniture for couch-potato, beer-swilling non-combatant TV-glued, potato crisp (chips) crunching American baseball fans on long Saturday afternoons. They help viewers doze off during the adverts.
Sir Keir Starmer should ask his mucker, Lord Alli, to drop one off at Downing Street. He could watch his beloved Arsenal without the trouble of dropping in on his freebie Emirates Stadium box.
We are introduced to Kill Chain, a group of off-site strategic advisers who direct Jess’ actions, and eventually give the instructions to spin up the Hellfire missiles. A bit like Sue Gray and the team of Special Advisers at Number 10. “Winter fuel allowance? – Fire!”
It’s a gruelling schedule, 12 hours a day, seven days a week, but Eric has forsaken his Wyoming roots and taken a job as a Blackjack croupier in a Vegas casino, so he, Jess and Sam can at least share a homelife.
The relentless delivery of death and destruction witnessed onscreen – in her F16 she could fly free, up to the beloved Blue – takes a toll on Jess and she begins to disassociate.
A doppelganger, Also Jess, appears, underpinning her increasingly split personality, sung by Ellie Dehn, an American soprano capable of soaring the musical heights as freely as an F16 takes to the sky.
Pause in the action to discuss Jess, Emily D’Angelo, the Canadian mezzo-soprano, graduate of the Met’s Lindemann Young Artist Program, upon whom Met Director, Peter Gelb had bet the ranch – not sure if it’s in Wyoming – for an opening night. Gelb won.
I thought D’Angelo was nothing short of stellar. She already has a discography with Deutsche Grammophon and is set for great things. Bursting with hard-edged, cropped hair personality, she was the ideal casting as Jess. Look out for her Susannah in Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro, later in the Met season.
Eric, ably sung by tenor, Ben Bliss, also a Lindemann Graduate, was close to home, coming from Prairie Village, Kansas. He premiered at the Met in 2014, as Vogelgesang in Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg in 2014 and will appear as Tamino, Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte – the Met’s serious version – later in the season.
The crisis comes when Jess must eliminate a terrorist target, The Serpent, who dodges around the desert in a family car. Difficult to identify. She becomes fixated and the strain impacts family life.
When The Serpent eventually does step into the open, he is accompanied by a child, so like Jess and Eric’s Sam. “Take the shot!” barks Kill Chain. Instead, Jess veers the Reaper away and in the final break with her passion for aerial combat, bellies the drone into the desert sand. Anticipating her cop-out, another, above, takes over and Serpent and daughter mix with sand, turning onscreen to the grey of death.
One – substantial – reservation. After an original outing at Washington National Opera – Gelb always road-tests new productions before letting them loose in New York – 45 minutes of the action was cut. I suspect that is when Jess’s character change evolved.
Because, suddenly, at the opening of Act II we are confronted with Eric and Jess in an unexplained, deteriorating home scene, having left them happy at the close of Act 1. More narrative needed. Mind you, another 45 minutes would have been de trop.
Tesori’s score is wonderful. She writes in that American voice, kicked off by Carlisle Floyd in his opera Susannah, and doffs her hat to him in an Act 1 aria figuring Jess, Eric and Sam, wondering and pointing at that Wyoming sky. Unmistakable riff on Ain’t it a Pretty Night.
The sound world is lyrical, the moments of drama explosive, delivered from the pit with vigour by the Met’s Music Director, Yannick Nézet-Séguin.
I had anticipated “woke, preachy”. Far from it. The temptation to stray from the fascinating story of Jess’s personal conflict was overcome. In today’s drone-dominated skies of human conflict, I left with a sobering understanding of what we demand of our serving personnel. Even those quaffing coffee in Laz-Y-Boy bunkers, seemingly distant from risk. They are not. PTSD is only a click away.
Jess is court-martialled and imprisoned. A narrowing shaft of white light shines down on her. But she has been released into her personal Land of the Free. The light goes out. “BOOM!. “What the f**k?”.
