Dead Man Walking? Too long, says NY Times

“Dead Man Walking,” which opened the Metropolitan Opera’s season on Tuesday, is about a man trying to put off his execution. And with this show, the Met is doing its best to avoid a fatal moment of its own….

In two acts and at two-and-a-half hours, it is also too long. Scenes almost inevitably outstay their welcomes, as if Heggie and McNally couldn’t resist just one more lush verse; on Tuesday, I often found myself simultaneously gripped and bored.

And, despite the powerful feelings ceaselessly on display, the opera never quite finds its way to riveting drama or tight conflict — even with a smartly airy production at the Met by Ivo van Hove, a pair of restrained yet charismatic stars in Joyce DiDonato and Ryan McKinny, and lavish playing from the orchestra, conducted by Yannick Nézet-Séguin, the company’s music director.

The production is not without its problems. For our introduction to the prison at Angola, a riot’s worth of convicts burst through the doors in a cloud of smoke (is it a prison or a cryogenic chamber?) to engage in what feels like a mass caricature of how prisoners behave: They brawl, they curse, they ogle the “woman on the tier.” One of them leans in like human italics to deride Sister Helen: “I’m talking to you, [expletive]!” It’s a bit much.

Likewise overdoing it was van Hove’s cinematic opening, which projected a prerecorded dramatization of the sexual assault and murder of the two youths on a giant screen. While the violence certainly sets the conditions for the existential challenge of Prejean’s longing to forgive, it also feels heavy-handed and indulgent in its brutality.

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