Met Opera's Penis Puppet Rules Lincoln in the Bardo Out of Cinemas

A six-foot-tall penis puppet has knocked Missy Mazzoli's Lincoln in the Bardo out of the Metropolitan Opera's worldwide cinema broadcasts. A member of the Met's HD team told reviewer Susan Hall that the puppet "is deemed inappropriate for worldwide distribution."

The decision arrives just as the opera enjoys its world premiere run at the Met in New York. Mazzoli stands, in Hall's assessment, at the forefront of contemporary American composers, and the house has assembled what she calls a luxury cast for the occasion.

Who stars in the premiere?

The cast is led by Peter Mattei as President Lincoln, with Stephanie Blythe, Christine Goerke and Anthony Roth Costanzo in the other principal roles. Gender fluidity abounds in the casting: Goerke sings The Reverend, a male role, while Costanzo plays a woman.

Everett Sobers earns special credit from Hall for performing Lincoln's dead son "with purity, elegance and a slightly wicked edge." The Met's orchestra met the challenge of a new score under conductor Yannick Nézet-Séguin, with particular kudos for the horns, brass and percussion.

What does the production look like?

Adam Rigg's set features a three-tiered walkway threaded with tangling vines. Montana Levi Blanco's costumes, often full-skirted and thickly textured with the brown dust of the bardo in Oak Hill Cemetery, outshine the plainer set and reflect the different historic periods in which the buried characters lived.

The opera is based on George Saunders' novel, which contains 166 voices. The Met gets by with fewer than a hundred. The stage, as Hall describes it, is full of dead people who imagine they are still alive — a world closer to purgatory than to Saunders' deeper account of Lincoln's grief.

Blythe stands out as Mrs. Baron, "combining a huge, wide-ranging voice with delicate gestures and comments."

What does the score sound like?

The score is pure Mazzoli, built on expressive ensemble phrases and solos, especially for the woodwinds. Hall finds novelty and oddity within traditional tonality, which keeps the music accessible and easy on the ear. The orchestration works as premonition: sliding up from growling tubas and trombones toward the stratosphere may herald a cry for help, while sliding down asks for quiet.

Gorgeous textures make the music sound innocent — but it never truly is in the tangled world of young Willie Lincoln and his father.

What happens next?

Audiences can still see the production live at the Met, but the HD exclusion means it will not reach the global cinema audience that the series commands. Hall's closing verdict is blunt: "Pity about the penis." The premiere itself stands as a milestone for Mazzoli, whose position in contemporary American opera the Met has now confirmed with a luxury staging.

Image: Karen Almond/Met