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Percussion clatters and whispers from high ledges.
Plumes of choral singing spring from unseen recesses.
A contrabass clarinet growls in the pit.
Mists of electronic sound drift through the house.
Deans music is often brilliant and never less than deft.
Thats not the arc that the opera follows or that the score actually depicts.
There is no insouciant before, only an elaborately hellish present.
Subtle verbal plays cant reliably muscle their way through a rowdy orchestra.
Timing is necessarily inflexible, and a skeptical murmur or a raised eyebrow is no help at all.
Those amusing interludes do little to lighten the mood.
It doesnt help that Shakespeares language gets shredded on its way to the opera stage.
Thats what supertitles are for.
In this show, the audience stays alert or gets left behind.
Hamlets mind is a crowded place: Shocks come by the thousand and troubles in a sea.
Dean commands the physical resources to literalize those imagined throngs.
But Dean has created a work that imposes, and demands, precision and control.
The vocal writing is minutely expressive.
The characters whisper, whine, holler, simper, and bluster, all in written-out leaps and jags.
Theres a price to pay for all this dazzlement.
Effective as each moment often is, I found the scores antic disposition wearing.
Its constant, high-octane insistence on overwhelming the audience delivers diminishing returns, and tragedy flirts with tedium.
Hamlets grievances, and his self-indulgent airing of them, begin to feed on themselves.
The framing offers little relief.
Hamletis at the Metropolitan Opera through June 9.
