The Prince wore white

If the words "free opera" make your heart flutter, come sit by me and let me tell you about the awesome thing that happened to me this week. I won tickets to "Hamlet" at the Metropolitan Opera through a random draw contest on Dailylit, a site I write about a lot and with whom I am currently suffering through WOMEN IN LOVE. (Not their fault.) They didn't ask me to blog about it, but I thought I would make some notes about the adaptation because some of it was very surprising to me as a general Shakespeare geek.

I had never heard of a musical version of "Hamlet," but it's a French opera by Ambroise Thomas that originally debuted in 1868. The first shocking thing that I learned from reading the program notes was that in Thomas' version, Hamlet lives. Say what? It turns out almost all productions of "Hamlet" in 19th-century France gave ol' Danish McSadbones a happy ending, because audiences in that era were not receptive to killing off the heroes. Can you imagine the uproar if a theater company were to pull this off today? ("Hamlet 2" doesn't count.) Thomas wrote an alternate ending in which Hamlet does die, but it was probably never performed in his lifetime. This "Hamlet" mixes both endings but allows the Prince to die in the end.

That's not the only significant change the opera makes to the play, but it's the most important. Instead of opening on the battlements, we open on the wedding of Gertrude and Claudius; Horatio and Polonius are reduced to bit parts and Ophelia's role is beefed up to a lead; and indeed, while this is a choice of design rather than direction, Hamlet appears for the first time wearing white, switching to black only after he sees the Ghost. As was also included in the program notes, there are three drinking songs that run about as counter to the mood as you can imagine, but the "play within a play" ends with an extended sequence of a triumphant Hamlet climbing on a table in front of the horrified court, wrapping himself in a tablecloth and pouring wine all over himself (resembling blood). It's a dramatic pre-intermission tableau but very striking.

Either because of the translation from French to English in the supertitles or just lyrical choices in general, virtually all of the language one remembers as being particularly "Hamlet" is missing from this libretto, making it more surprising when it does appear (as Claudius' "My words fly up, my thoughts remain below"). What's it like seeing Shakespeare without the Shakespeare in it? ... Weird. One line from the gravediggers' scene even seems like a commentary on the original play as one chucks a skull out of the grave and says something like "They told us who he was... but we forgot." Alas, poor whoever! I knew him but not well enough apparently!

Hamlet's famous soliloquies are mostly reduced to a few lines, with two exceptions: "Now might I do it pat" (where Hamlet contemplates killing Claudius at prayer) and "To be or not to be" (in French, "Etre ou ne pas être") become arias of their own standing. Still, they don't follow the lines as we're used to; in fact, to my great amusement, the supertitled opening of "Etre ou ne pas être" read as follows:

To be or not to be...
Oh, what mystery!

High school students everywhere couldn't have said it better.

As befits Ophelia's larger role, her death sequence is much more prominent, taking up all of act IV, and surprisingly more moving. I usually have a problem with Ophelia as performed, because a lot of actresses... overcommit to the madness and end up with a character you want to laugh at instead of pity. As written by Thomas, this Ophelia is on the brink of getting married to Hamlet (Gertrude's genius idea to take away his melancholy), only to be stood up, enduring a long Miss Havisham moment in her bridal gown, stabbing herself in the chest and wrists and then drowning herself while hallucinating the water nymphs are calling to her. Maybe it's because she is singing throughout the whole production, but seeing Jane Archibald casting about the flowers somehow stripped the performance back to the horror of seeing a beautiful girl driven mad -- ironically closer to Shakespeare's intention, I think, despite the gore and the sheer length of her dying throes.

For a Shakespeare nerd such as myself, getting the chance to absorb and digest this was a perfect night out, not least because our seats were unbelievable. I have been to the Met twice before since I moved to New York, both times strategically planning my visit around when I could get the least expensive seats in the top-level Family Circle. Sitting in the orchestra, I could see moments between characters that felt almost intimate, which seems like a funny word to be used in opera. I brought my friend P., an opera virgin who was pleasantly surprised at how fast-moving and riveting it was. (The first opera I ever saw was "The Magic Flute," which is a lot more playful and catchier, in case you're looking to get into the genre.)

Although his performance required a different set of skills than an actor would face in the straight play, Simon Keenlyside sung a great Hamlet, bringing subtlety to a part that could easily be incredibly exaggerated. (The New York Times called him "the Ralph Fiennes of baritones," although he looked more like a Nathan Fillion to me, especially when he came out wearing a brown trench coat in the final act. I noticed that just for you, Internet!) Archibald was great, and David Pittsinger as the Ghost -- and while I didn't care for Jennifer Larmore as Gertrude, technically she was excellent.

The Met's "Hamlet" is closed now, but if you ever have the chance to see this opera I would definitely take it. This is my seventh live "Hamlet," so I'm in the tank as far as the play is concerned, but it's interesting to contemplate what an earlier era might have considered "decent" to show on stage (not duels, for one thing!) and how that shaped those audiences' experiences with Shakespeare. Thanks to Dailylit and merci beaucoup to the Met for sponsoring a night out I could not have had otherwise.