Review: Lyric Opera of Chicago revives David McVicar’s Salome

It’s rare for vintage opera productions to age into feeling more relevant with each revival. I’d argue that’s the case with Scottish director Sir David McVicar’s prescient 2008 Royal Ballet & Opera production of Salome, which is now making a powerful North American debut with the Lyric Opera of Chicago until 14 February.

McVicar’s Salome famously junked the usual orientalist New Testament biblical settings of the sensationally controversial 1905 opera by composer Richard Strauss, which was adapted from Oscar Wilde’s oft-banned 1893 play. Instead, McVicar and production designer Es Devlin went with an early 1930s updating inspired by Italian filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini’s violent and nudity-filled 1975 antifascist film Salò, or The 120 Days of Sodom — also a much-banned work.

Now, it’s not as if Salome needed extra reasons to shock audiences. There’s anticipated nudity written into the infamous “Dance of the Seven Veils” when the princess Salome performs for Herod in order to obtain the severed head of Jochanaan (John the Baptist) on a silver platter. And then there’s Salome’s extended final scene that veers in the direction of necrophilia as she sings about her before-and-after reactions to kissing the mouth of the beheaded Jochanaan.

But for his Salome, McVicar also pushes audiences to seriously reconsider the unsettling situation of Salome growing up around her lecherous uncle, now stepfather, Herod. Rather than being a real-time striptease, the “Dance of the Seven Veils” in McVicar’s production is reimagined by choreographer Andrew George as a series of pantomimed flashbacks, showing Herod relentlessly grooming (or even molesting) Salome since her childhood. Rather than veils dropping, seven doors open and sweep across the stage to reveal rooms that make Herod’s grand manor into a house of horrors akin to Duke Bluebeard’s Castle.

But there are also real-time shocks in McVicar’s Salome, since it’s very clear that the housemaids are passed around as drugged-up sexual playthings to both wealthy guests and on-duty soldiers. The below-stairs and serving staff also cower in the presence of their high-and-mighty rulers, especially since there’s a muscly executioner on hand at all times to fulfil Herod’s deadly commands.

Back in 2008, when I first experienced McVicar’s Salome, it put me in mind of British class system dramas like the 2001 Julian Fellowes/Robert Altman film Gosford Park, or the ITV series Upstairs, Downstairs — albeit on a much more depraved scale. But subsequent revivals have only made the McVicar Salome more powerfully relevant, especially since it predated the disturbing sexual coercion revelations of the “MeToo Movement” of the 2010s, plus the recent release of files tied to the late global financier and sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein.

As faithfully re-staged by German revival director Julia Burbach, Salome at the Lyric has been toned down a tad. The sexually exploited maids are not naked in this revival, though the male executioner still sheds all to perform an execution as he descends and rises all bloodied from the basement cistern.

The Lyric’s Salome was also beset by several changes before performances began. American soprano Jennifer Holloway took over the title role to make her Lyric debut after the originally announced Russian soprano Elena Stikhina withdrew due to her pregnancy. Holloway previously sang Salome with Atlanta Opera, and her powerfully bright soprano voice certainly reflects the petulance of her young princess character, who is used to getting her way in this marathon performance.

American tenor Brandon Jovanovich also left the role of Herod during rehearsals, allowing for American tenor Alex Boyer to make his Lyric debut (Boyer similarly understudied Jovanovich and went on a few times for him last season as Captain Ahab during the Metropolitan Opera run of Moby-Dick). Vocally, Boyer was no slouch in the role of Herod, though I wished for more paranoia and unhinged acting in his performance in the way that Jovanovich previously impressed as the gambling-obsessive Hermann in a 2019 Lyric run of The Queen of Spades.

But the Lyric debut that truly made you sit up to take notice was American bass-baritone Nicholas Brownlee as Jochanaan. The instant that Brownlee’s bedraggled religious prophet crawled onstage, his booming voice filled the house with loads of volume and gravitas. The tension was electric as Brownlee’s Jochanaan sparred with Holloway’s Salome. Also adding to the obsessive drama in the first half was American tenor Ryan Capozzo as the manipulated soldier Narraboth and American mezzo-soprano Catherine Martin as the Page who pines for Narraboth.

Once Herod and his dinner party guests descended to the utilitarian bowels of his manor house, some of the urgency seemed to dissipate on opening night. And that’s despite the high vocal polish of German mezzo-soprano Tanja Ariane Baumgartner as the haughty Herodias among the argumentative quartet of visiting Jews (Bille Bruley, Travon D Walker, Daniel Luis Espinal, Zhengyi Bai and Benjamin R Sokol) and the prophesying Nazarenes of Aleksey Bogdanov and Sihao Hu.

I wasn’t sure if this was due to Czech conductor Tomáš Netopil (also making his Lyric debut), perhaps luxuriating a tad too long with the enlarged Lyric Opera Orchestra in the lush Strauss orchestrations. Or perhaps it might have been in the performers’ acting, not quite embodying the full extreme emotions of the oversized characters in the latter half of the opera.

Salome will always be an opera to make audiences uncomfortably squirm in their seats. But as more contemporary revivals raise alarms about the abuses of power and patriarchal subjugation of women, Salome also takes on a mantle of shining an ugly mirror to our own times. So it’s both thrilling and sad to have McVicar’s Salome blaze so truthfully across the Lyric Opera of Chicago stage in our current cultural and political moment.

The Lyric Opera of Chicago’s North American premiere of Sir David McVicar’s 2008 Royal Ballet & Opera production of Salome continues through Friday 14 February at the Lyric Opera House, 20 N. Wacker Drive, Chicago. For more information, visit LyricOpera.org.

Scott C. Morgan

Chicago-based Scott C. Morgan is an avid opera and theatergoer. He is a frequent freelance contributor to the Windy City Times, and previously served as that publication’s freelance theater editor from 2008 to 2018. He also worked primarily as an arts writer for the Daily Herald in suburban Chicago from 2004 to 2022.

He has raised donations as an endurance race runner for AIDS Foundation Chicago via its charity training program Team to End AIDS from 2011 to 2023, and also co-hosted two Opera Tunes fundraisers at Chicago’s famed Sidetrack Video Bar in 2019.