


Some may remember when the Metropolitan Opera decided to toss its legacy overboard and stage a production of the antisemitic and pro-terrorist modern opera ‘The Death of Klinghoffer’ that justified the murder of an elderly wheelchair-bound Jewish American by Muslim terrorists. Despite the protests, the hatefest at the Met went on.
And anyone with decency turned their backs on the Met.
‘The Death of Klinghoffer’, rather than being a one-off affair to satisfy a donor, was the new paradigm of woke ‘modern operas’ whose music is as bad as their politics. And here’s where things stand now.
Jake Heggie’s “Dead Man Walking” opened the Metropolitan Opera’s 2023-24 season on Sept. 26… Terrence McNally’s libretto traces Sister Helen’s relationship with Joseph De Rocher, a prisoner convicted of the rape and murder of a high-school-age couple, as his last appeals fail and his execution date approaches. Much of the opera takes place within the Louisiana State Penitentiary in Angola, and the Met’s marquee production team, headed by Ivo van Hove with set and lighting design by Jan Versweyveld, created a strikingly austere environment: a blank-walled box, with a smaller cube suspended above the stage.
Pathetic but inevitable. Much of Broadway now consists of Hollywood adaptations, why shouldn’t the Met?
When elite audiences are as woke as they are culturally illiterate, putting on this kind of garbage makes perfect sense.
What else can you expect at the Met?
The three other Met premieres this season are all vintage: Anthony Davis’s “X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X” (1986) in a newly revised version, co-produced with four other companies
Apart from the usual Verdi, Puccini, Bizet stuff (you can guess which ones), the Met is pushing black nationalist garbage like Fire Shut Up in My Bones and X, and adaptations like Dead Man Walking and The Hours.
Within a decade, the Metropolitan Opera went from the gold standard to a bad joke that can be counted on for movie adaptations, black nationalist productions, and Madame Butterfly.
American theater, at least in its current state, is dead. Its zombie corpse is reanimated by an all-female revival of 1776 and a version of Oklahoma that denounces ‘whiteness’ and ‘colonialism’. The less said of ‘original works’ the better. And now even opera has become a bad joke, but I’m sure the opera version of The Help or Get Out will be great. (If these don’t exist yet, they soon will.)
The Soviet Union at least preserved the classics. Our modern cultural barbarians are even worse vandals.
Dead Man Walking? Dead Met Crawling.