PAGING MOBY DICK, CALLING ISHMAEL, & NEEDING A QUEEQUEG HUG

Review: Moby Dick at The Metropolitan Opera

by Brad Vogel - March 25, 2025

Call me…a bit underwhelmed. Let’s just say the titular snowhill of a cetacean does not actually make an appearance on stage in tangible form (!). Nor, really, does Ishmael. The first of these fatal flaws basically stove in this review, and the second put the nail in the coffin. So, row don’t motorboat to see Moby Dick, composer Jake Heggie’s operatic adaptation of Melville at the Met through March 29th. 

Pisces energy ran high in the plazas outside the operahouse before the evening’s Nantucket sleighride. A former NYC Poet Afloat greeted me randomly by the pool featuring large bronze sculptures (abstacted sperm whale vertebrae?). My companions, Captain Patrick and the lovely Elisha, recalled meeting in Florida through a long conversation about the white whale. I wore my best Baffin Bay-blue suit, and Patrick’s shark tooth necklace-with-blazer struck a good oceanic note as we strode into the great mid-century palace under a giant whaletale, a copy of Moby Dick in hand with passages read aloud as we traipsed winding entrail stairways, Jonahs guided by starburst chandeliers of Austrian crystal. 

Up, up, up we went and wound our way to Balcony level perches. It all seemed worth skipping a “Geezers” meeting (NY Ship Lore & Model Club, if you haven’t been). I sat solo with a cheap last minute “partial view” seat in scarlet box 3, port side of the hall. A duo burst in at the last second believing, errantly, they had both seats in the tiny crowsnest, causing me to miss the beloved ascent of the sputnik lights that signal the start of a performance. 

The curtain rose. But only barely. And we were treated to a lackluster, watered down version of the famously queer-coded inn scene. But there was no Ishmael (only a pseudo-character called “Greenhorn” (seriously?)) and no waking to a tattooed Queequeg embrace. A decidedly weak, nebulous start. And then it was over. Bam. Suddenly we were aboard the Pequod and sailing away. Where were the stowing Quaker owners? The music intrigued and thrilled now, the massive crew chorus (appropriately diverse to do the novel justice, I must say) on stage excited, the rigging and the curvaceous white hull wall set the scene (though the black mast and spars appeared annoyingly two-dimensional from my vantage). Captain Ahab (sung by Alex Boyer that night) didn’t wait ominously in his cabin to reveal himself but burst out immediately with dubloon in hand. I get that one must not use the blubber spade spardingly to condense (try?) a 135-chapter book somehow. But some of the most central, iconic aspects of the story were jettisoned before we even left the harbor. Oy. 

It was a trend: Ahab’s secret Muslim boat crew never showed up, nor did his strange fatherly relationship with Pip. Queequeg’s knowing wit, too, seemed elusive (and while Ryan Speedo Green gave a great performance, the libretto lines given him seemed watered down). While the men of the crew danced together, there was no ecstasy of goopy hands, no psychological meditation on the meaning of the color white. Most peculiar, iconoclastic quirks that lift Moby Dick the novel off into the realms of greatness had been excised like fins to be fed to the sharks. 

The libretto really did drag and feel blunted at times. In both the first and the second act, an oversimplification and a repetitiveness crept in often (you can only sing “in the heart of the sea” and call back Philbrick’s book about the whaleship Essex so many times without inducing catalepsy), especially during scenes with only one or two singers onstage. People literally went to sleep in the audience. I myself almost hung up a hammock several times. 

I kept wondering where the whaleboats were. And this query was answered in one of the most exhilarating tricks of the evening: lighting transformed the great hull wall into giant waves, and handhold rungs allowed crews to climb into the “boats” outlined in white light. When disaster befell, the boats would flip, disintegrate, and the crew would go sliding precariously down the slide into the frothing seas. While the production was definitely overreliant on video effects (I’m a Zeffirelli maximalist, tangible staging kinda guy - this is the opera, damnit!), this was quite good. 

The staging of the infernal “trying out” of a harpooned whale also proved striking. Glistening men at the hellish trypots with their rendering implements appeared as a portion of the great hull wall flipped forward. Huge hunks of whale were hacked and slopped about in fiery orange light. The mood matched Starbuck’s doomed efforts to dissuade Ahab from his unswerving vengeance-driven mission to kill the white whale even if it meant foregoing the commercial viability of the voyage. It evoked our current national plight: a demagogue intent on driving all before his madness - “it flows like the unabated Hudson” - even if it wrecks his country. It all got me wondering if Thomas Paine’s line “These are the times that try mens’ souls” was really about running one’s principles and convictions through the foul process of national existential crisis, to purify one’s patriotism down into its essence.   

Intermission suggested that Instagram ads must’ve been targeting mariners heavily for this particular Wednesday night production. I found myself in the good company of no fewer than five actual USCG-certified ship captains in the throngs lined up for libations. For one, the night marked a maiden voyage to the Met and to an opera. Classic Habor Line, South Street Seaport Museum, Billion Oyster Project, Brooklyn Boatworks, and Schooner Apollonia - all had mariners in the mix. Everyone agreed there was much rigging on stage, though it was unclear where or what some of the yards were actually doing (or how they were made off). 

Clambering back aloft, I found I was entirely alone on watch for the second act. The music really ramped up with the storm onstage into its best, most impressive self: a mass chorus, heavy timpani, contorted strings, ominous brass - the mood finally began to feel like Moby Dick. Scenes where Ahab went aloft and where St. Elmo’s fire enveloped the rigging like mesmerizing quicksilver (the rigging itself was now more robust, developed and, at a glance, somewhat more logical) hit home with real power. 

But after a chorus of coughing erupted in the audience (people holding it in across the stormy scenes and finally letting go?), the latter half of the second act began to drown in unfortunate choices. There were moments to grab at the flotsam of great xylophone passages and an eerily MAGA-tastic “we are the body of Ahab” choral patriotic ululation. But duets between Starbuck and Ahab amidst blue skies seemed bizarrely off-point, cheery, and forced, as if a producer had decided the movie needed a conventional love interest even if the story didn’t have one or want one. Scenes went on too slowly too often, and I found myself yawning like crazy even as I noted the barefoot sailors, the mending of the sail by hand as backdrop. The cappuccino I’d downed during intermission was not enough to batten down the hatches; the hurricane of drowsiness broke upon me and I began to take on water, barely laboring on through the crests and troughs. We knew where this was going, the determinism surfacing as Ahab revealed the story had been set “a billion years before this ocean rolled.”

But then, did we know where this was going? My anxieties kept growing. The compass spun in the binnacle. Where is the whale? Surely the entire great white hull abaft the stage would flip down at the last moment and a gargantuan, real, sublime, thought-bludgeoning whale would dominate the stage of the Met and the opera would reach its climax.

It did not. There was no whale. 

Instead, a too-bright trumpet motif reminiscent of Sufjan Stephen’s Illinoise accompanied Ahab singing against a backdrop of roiling white waves…and the video eye of a whale rushing at him.

I jotted: “No Ishmael and no whale - DO NOT BILL THIS AS MOBY DICK, BRUH”  It was a whale of a letdown to see a video-only ship-smasher right when I should have been catapulted into the stars. 

The final scene was awkward to watch. “Greenhorn” floating alone on a coffin, finally “finds a name” for himself, and the famous first line is at last delivered as the last line. It felt like a bad joke where people begrudgingly raise their eyebrows, barely able to muster a “heh” and begin looking for their coat in earnest. A line and hook descended and slowly retrieved him like a cane coming out from the wrong side of a vaudeville stage…but looked more like an alien ship was extracting him for specimen testing in bland broad daylight. This was no Porgy hobbling off the back of the stage alone into the darkness (a concluding scene on Broadway a decade ago that almost broke me); I wanted this to end. 

Some people, it turns out, don’t know how to end the reading of a great poem. And when you know the poem has more potential than the gloss the reader’s given, the performance gets a grade of B/B- in my book. The oil was worth the squeeze - by a bit but no more. 

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