C4 EZ RE THE WASHINGTON POST.MONDAY, APRIL 25 , 2022
knowledged the warped, damag-
ing and excessive coverage of
the Hillary Clinton email “scan-
dal” — certainly not in the same
deep and forthright public-fac-
ing way that it dealt with its
misleading and credulous re-
porting in the run-up to the Iraq
War.
I wouldn’t expect Kahn to do
that now, nor do I expect him to
restore the office of public edi-
tor. I do think it’s realistic to
hope that he and his newly as-
sembled leadership team will
look searchingly at today’s polit-
ical situation and adjust accord-
ingly.
There is no need to abandon
journalistic principles. In fact,
adherence to the press’s true
mission and highest calling de-
mands journalism that discards
the safety-seeking instinct for
false equivalency. It demands
journalism that relentlessly and
boldly presents the truth.
The immense influence of the
Times on the entire media world
is a huge responsibility. Kahn is
more likely to meet this crucial
moment than anyone else who
could have been chosen.the New York Times no longer
has an ombudsman, which
would have been one way to
hear critical voices. It scuttled
the public editor position in
2017, about a year after I con-
cluded my stint.
The brass defended its deci-
sion by saying that there was
plenty of criticism of the Times,
particularly on social media,
and thus no need for an internal
critic. That argument never
made sense since the public edi-
tor, by definition, was in a posi-
tion to seek responses from edi-
tors and relay that response to
readers, along with her own
judgment. That’s not so with
complaints on Twitter, which are
largely ignored and viewed in-
ternally as just so much annoy-
ing noise. As it happens, Baquet
recently instructed Times staff-
ers to pay less attention to social
media.
So where, exactly, is the self-
scrutiny supposed to come
from? Academic white papers?
Cocktail party conversations?
Conversations among the edi-
tors themselves?
The Times has never fully ac-ment calls for — no, screams for
— a different approach to poli-
tics and government coverage.
To get there, he’ll need to seek
out and listen to voices who can
speak truth to his new power.
Like many other news organi-
zations — including The Post —proach.” That’s certainly true
when it comes to business strat-
egy, which has been wildly suc-
cessful; as one measure, the
company now boasts some 10
million subscribers.
But I’m hopeful that Kahn
will understand that this mo-The question now is whether
Kahn can bring that spirit of
thoughtful openness, in a mean-
ingful way, to his new role —
particularly when one of the
world’s most influential news
organizations is in need of seri-
ous soul-searching.
Our very democracy is on the
brink, and how the Times covers
that existential threat is of ex-
traordinary importance, espe-
cially as crucial elections ap-
proach this fall and in 2024. Will
the paper’s coverage forthrightly
identify the problems posed by a
radicalized Republican Party
that is increasingly dedicated to
lies, bad-faith attacks and the
destruction of democratic
norms, or will it try to treat to-
day’s politics as simply the result
of bipartisan “polarization”?
Will it try to cut the situation
straight down the middle as if
we were still in the old days —
an era that no longer exists?
There are plenty of doubters.
Kyle Pope, editor of Columbia
Journalism Review, wrote last
week that in picking Kahn “the
newspaper is signaling that it
has no plans to rethink its ap-Kahn, who oversaw interna-
tional coverage at the time, had
the ability to put his emotions to
the side and to listen, without
bristling, to reader complaints
and to consider adjustments. To
be sure, other Times editors
could show grace and self-reflec-
tion — outgoing editor Dean Ba-
quet often acknowledged to me
what he considered his “screw-
ups” — but openness to criticism
is not a primary characteristic of
high-ranking media executives.
I retain one vivid memory of
Kahn, from the day I brought
him some vehement complaints
about the paper’s coverage of the
2014 Gaza war. His office fea-
tured a bust of Robert F. Ken-
nedy, an award for his reporting
on labor conditions in China’s
export factories. At one point
during our conversation, he put
his head in his hands, as if to say
“this is painful.” There was a
kind of candor in this small ges-
ture. It certainly was different
body language than, for exam-
ple, arms defensively crossed
over one’s chest.
SULLIVAN FROM C1
MARGARET SULLIVAN
Joe Kahn will helm the Times at a pivotal time. Will he rise to the occasion?
CELESTE SLOMAN FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
Joe Kahn will soon b e executive editor of the New York Times.BY MICHAEL ANDOR BRODEURnew york — Lammermoor
ain’t what it used to be. Or, at
least, it wasn’t Saturday night at
the Metropolitan Opera.
In Simon Stone’s visually
stunning and conceptually ar-
resting production of Donizetti’s
enduring 1835 opera “Lucia di
Lammermoor,” the verdant hills
and wild landscape of 18th-cen-
tury Scotland have been paved
over and replaced with the living
ruins of the American Rust Belt:
a pawnshop, a cheap motel, a
liquor store, an ATM that charg-
es too much. Its natural glories
now artificial and garish; its
mysteries now a minimart.
But, although its surfaces may
seem familiar at first, over the
course of three meticulously
modernized acts, this blighted,
unidentified patch of dystopia
reveals itself as a far more
unforgiving landscape. It’s an
amalgam of Lucia’s internal and
external terrain, a hybrid of a
hardscrabble life and an unruly
dream.
Stone dispatches a vast ar-
senal of devices, effects and, yes,
some straight-up gimmicks to
turn Lucia’s descent into mad-
ness inside-out and to drag the
story into a contemporary con-
text, like a bride to an unwanted
wedding.
This includes Alice Babidge
and Blanca Añón’s costumes
(which find soprano Nadine Si-
erra’s Lucia in an instantly icon-
ic ensemble of frosted jeans and
a cropped pink parka), and
Lizzie Clachan’s spectacular ro-
tating set. It was in near-con-
stant motion, cycling through an
increasingly claustrophobic loop
that would feel familiar to any-
one raised in a small town: its
features fragmenting and split-
ting along with Lucia’s psyche in
a slow whirl that starts to feel
more like a vortex.
But most evident among
Stone’s various bells and whis-
tles are the screens and cameras,
which, in true 21st-century form,
are everywhere.
Camera crews stalk the stage,
trail the characters and embed
themselves in the wedding party,
sending a live feed of footage to a
“split-screen” suspended over
the action. (When the curtain
raised, a caption on the screen
read: “Lucia: Close-Ups of a
Cursed Life,” eliciting a murmur
of seeming concern across the
audience.) Other times, the
screen is employed for flash-
backs and cutaways to real and
hallucinated events. And, as Lu-
cia unravels, the split of the
screen enacts the fissure be-
tween Lucia’s reality and every-
one else’s.
Screens also emerge in the
form of social media, where
photos on Facebook and Insta-
gram play key roles in a fabricat-
ed betrayal, and where the divi-
sions between reality and fanta-
sy are further tested. Between
the camera crews and the char-
acters’ smartphones, the ques-
tion of how Lucia defines her
own destiny grows increasingly
fraught.
Although Sierra has sung this
role several times, this is a new
Lucia — one who fumbles
around in her big purse for her
iPhone and lipstick; who sneaks
out of her bedroom window and
down the fire escape for a night
out; who gossips with her girl-
friend behind the screen of a
disused drive-in (silently show-
ing Bob Hope’s 1947 comedy “My
Favorite Brunette”); who snaps
selfies with her forbidden lover,
Edgardo (sensuously sung by
tenor Javier Camarena).
And in a moment conspicu-
ously stretched by Stone into a
slow-motion slip into ecstasy,
she also downs a shot of a
mysterious elixir from the local
pharmacy — one that seems to
introduce ghosts, initiate a deep-
ening despair and invoke (to
uncertain effect) the opioid cri-
sis. This is a Lucy Ashton by way
of Laura Palmer.
It should be noted here thatEdgardo isn’t the only one whose
relationship with Lucia is com-
plicated. Scan reviews of the
many returns to Lammermoor
by the Met over the past cou-
ple of decades, and you’ll find a
long tradition of critics andsalty audiences working far
harder to protect Lucia from
attack than her abusive brother,
Enrico, ever did. (Sometimes,
this just means booing the cre-
ative team.)For instance, in 1992, a young
Francesca Zambello made her
Met stage directorial debut with
a “Lucia” set “in the half-seen
realm of the unconscious” that
was pelted with boos and scath-
ing reviews. When it attempted acomeback two years later, the
New York Times’s Bernard Hol-
land dryly advised the Met to
“get this production off its books
as quickly as it can.”
Four years later, a conceptual-ly reined-in olive branch produc-
tion from French director Nico-
las Joel was equally lambasted
for, among other things, playing
the story too safe, abandoning
any perceptible point of view. A
subsequent production by Mary
Zimmerman proved adequate
for Met audiences, bringing
many a talented and blood-
soaked Lucia to her knees on the
Met stage (Diana Damrau, Anna
Netrebko, Natalie Dessay and
Pretty Yende among them).
But those who seek to tinker
anew with the opera often find
themselves in a similar predica-
ment to Lucia: Damned if you
do, damned if you don’t.
Stone appears to give neither
of these damns, opting for an
approach that forgoes fidelity in
favor of an aggressive examina-
tion of the internal and external
forces laying siege to Lucia’s
sanity. The Australian directormade waves with his 2016 pro-
duction of Federico García Lor-
ca’s “Yerma,” and again with a
2019 production of Cherubini’s
“Médée” at the Salzburg Festival.
You could say that women on the
verge of a nervous breakdown
have become something of a
sweet spot.
Even still, for all the altera-
tions Stone has made, he has
also maintained the exquisite
silhouette of Donizetti’s music,
which, throughout the opera,
was conducted with tenderness,
intention and exciting dynamic
elasticity by Riccardo Frizza. If
anything, the faithfulness of the
music provided grounding for
the crisscrossing realities of the
staging, which, at times, strug-
gled to corral attention in the
right places. Mariko Anraku’s
harp and Friedrich Heinrich
Kern’s turn on the glass harmon-
ica were especially beautiful, the
warble of the latter capturing
the wobble of Lucia’s wits.
And the singing across the
cast was stellar. Camarena lent
Edgardo a sweetness and soft-
ness that only made his heart-
ache sting more sharply in his
showstopping final aria. The
Polish baritone Artur Rucinski
made a delightfully detestable
Enrico, his wood-paneled office
littered with overdue bills a
perfect cage for the wounded
animal of his voice. You could
read desperation all over his face
— although the tattoos were
harder to make out. And
bass Matthew Rose embodied
one of the finest Raimondos
I’ve heard, the authority of his
voice routinely softened by
a deep and conflicted compas-
sion.
Sierra’s Lucia was fiery and
finessed — and with the heavy
reliance on close-ups and seem-
ingly candid moments stolen
through the camera, she proved
herself an arresting actress, too.
If the measure of any Lucia is
truly the “mad scene,” Sierra
truly rose to the occasion — or
collapsed, as it were. She orna-
mented her final aria as though
blithely decorating a dead tree,
fully committed to Lucia’s utter
detachment. (Though I did find
myself wishing we had more
lead-up to the meltdown, more
than the traces we were given of
fissures in her composure.) In
her final moments, as she
trained her glare on the camera
and vanished behind the opera’s
artifice, it was as though she
were staring into your soul — or
her phone.
Of course, this seems like the
intended effect of Stone’s experi-
ment: a blurring of distance and
intimacy, an equation of per-
formance and reality. “Lucia di
Lammermoor” is an operatic
experience that lands some-
where between the rubble of an
obliterated fourth wall and an
episode of “Euphoria.” I barely
recognized Lucia, but I’ve also
never seen her quite so clearly.Lucia di Lammermoor runs
through May 21 at the Metropolitan
Opera, 30 Lincoln Center Plaza,
New York. Visit metopera.com for
tickets and information.OPERA REVIEW
A modern meltdown in the Met’s ‘Lucia di Lammermoor’
MARTY SOHL/METROPOLITAN OPERAMARTY SOHL/METROPOLITAN OPERA ZENITH RICHARDS/METROPOLITAN OPERA/ASSOCIATED PRESS
CLOCKWISE FROM TOP: Nadine Sierra in the title role of the Metropolitan Opera’s production of Donizetti’s “Lucia di Lammermoor,”
directed by Simon Stone; Sierra has sung the role of Lucia several times, but now, the character is someone who sneaks out of her bedroom
window and down the fire escape for a night out; Javier Camarena as Edgardo and Artur Rucinski a s Enrico.Simon Stone dispatches a vast arsenal of devices,effects and, yes, some straight-up gimmicks to turnLucia’s descent into madness inside-out andto drag the story into a contemporary context.S0115-6x1washingtonpost.com/recipesSearch our database of tested
recipes by ingredient or name.What’s for dinner?