Hi. I know I said this was ready to publish days ago. I lied, just like Cyndi Lauper lied to Cher about not being in her Kennedy Center Honors tribute. In any case, it’s the end of this series about The Hours (2002), Margaret (2011), and The Hours (2022). If you’re here, I’m assuming you have a general working knowledge of The Hours and won’t be bothered that I spoil a major plot point. If you’re one of the many people who might gasp at this plot point playing out onstage at the Met, proceed with caution. You might also proceed with caution if you have a solid working understanding of the Dukakis rule (I do not, and I am sorry). If you’re into my little ditty about something I love so much it makes my teeth hurt, subscribe and stay a while! I’ll be back to glib short form lists and essays soon. I promise.
One of the great things life gives me to enjoy is an unhinged text message. Doesn’t matter if it’s in content or delivery (or both!): as long as some aspect of the text makes me go, “excuse me what is happening,” I cherish it. There are almost no texts I have cherished more than when I received, “How did the official announcement of this new operatic The Hours starring Renée Fleming, Kelli O’Hara, and Joyce DiDonato come in a profile by Maureen Dowd” in July of 2020. The news you can use comes from the least likely of places sometimes (but when Dowd comes through, she comes through, and happy just-over-one year anniversary of Tchaikovsky’s Fifth orgasm patron to us all). Since that text, my concept of The Hours as an opera has grown from a fascination to a given. Of course it was always meant to be an opera. Of course it was meant to be conceived by Renée Fleming. Of course it was going to premiere at the Met. Of course it was destined to become one of my great hyperfixations.
Look, I’m not a music critic or a classical musician. I AM, however, someone who purchased Stephen Daldry’s The Hours on DVD from the Housing Works Bookstore and then had to pretend I had not seen the film easily 100+ times already when the cashier asked if I’d heard if the movie was any good. I hold a BFA (emphasis on the FINE) in Musical Theatre and once sang in the bim bom children’s chorus of Mahler’s Third. I also have a compulsive need to peel back the layers of art that moves me, not just until I see what makes it tick, but until I get to the heart of what drew me to it in the first place. Hope you’re ready: I’m going long on Kevin Puts’ The Hours!
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When Kevin Puts and Renée Fleming were collaborating on a full length opera, Fleming says that a Rosenkavalier-esque trio was her first thought when presented with The Hours as a pitch for an opera. She also gave me the chance to go, “ooooh, girl, same,” to how she immediately saw operatic qualities in The Hours, but I digress. When Fleming stepped away from traditional rep with her final Marschallin in 2017, she left the Met stage (for a little while, at least) with a piece about mourning the passing of time, letting go, and change in the face of love. What a perfect circle for her to return to the Met alongside another soprano (Kelli O’Hara as Laura Brown) and a mezzo (Joyce DiDonato as Virginia Woolf) with The Hours as Clarissa Vaughn.
Film, as anyone who’s gotten coverage on their first screenplay after primarily reading and writing plays can tell you, is a visual medium, but opera gets to be visual AND musical AND theatrical AND lyrical. In Phelim McDermott’s production, the movie’s match cuts through the parallel moments of each woman’s life become mirrored staging, each woman’s single day unfolding simultaneously. When Laura runs away to a hotel with Mrs. Dalloway and sleeping pills, instead of the film’s fantasy of water flooding the room, Puts and librettist Greg Pierce give Laura and Virginia a shimmering duet to contemplate if this is really what the end of their lives will look like, completing each other’s musical ideas and sentences.
The novel and the movie both begin with Virginia Woolf’s suicide, stark and graphic. Save for thanking Leonard Woolf (Sean Panikkar) with words from Virginia’s final letter left for him and Laura wondering how someone with Virginia’s capacity for capturing life’s beauty could take her own life, the opera almost doesn’t explicitly mention Virginia’s end at all. Instead, it hangs visual hints of it all over the production: Tom Pye’s set wraps the proscenium in blue, and he’s costumed the chorus and dancers in shades of blue and grey, with white streaks that suggest ripples across each costume piece. When Bruno Poet’s lighting hits just right, the stage seems to be underwater. In moments of particular anguish, for Virginia especially, Finn Ross’ projections of water take us under the river’s surface with her.
I unabashedly love the dancers and Annie-B Parson’s choreography. Some of that might be because in college, I hung out with too many dance majors who would do Graham pleadings as a bit, but more of it is because I immediately understood them as a movement Greek chorus. They each push around a pill bottle of their own as Laura considers if she’ll actually take all those sleeping pills. They scribble around Virginia as she manically writes. They move Clarissa through grief over Richard’s body after he ends his life. Parson’s choreography alternates between explosion and near stillness in gesture. There’s contrast in tension and intimacy in so much of the staging. It took my breath away when Laura crosses what feels like an endless void of negative space to her son the first time they’re left alone together, and when Clarissa almost prayerfully grieves over Richard.
Laura and Virginia are mostly confined to their own side of the stage (stage right and stage left, respectively). It’s Clarissa who gets to make crosses from one side to the other, existing in the spheres of Virginia’s Dalloway and Richard Brown’s (Kyle Ketelsen) Dalloway. As someone who’s loved The Hours in all its forms for so long, it’s maybe a little embarrassing to admit, but I realized that Richard is Virginia when Richard’s designated chair for his party is in the same position as Virginia’s chair for the final trio. (I, quite literally, grabbed my friend’s hand and whispered, “OH! OH, HE’S VIRGINIA! HE’S VIRGINIA AND CLARISSA IS LEONARD!!” So, you know, thank you to everyone for that, well done, team, great blocking, etc.) Virginia’s furious scribblings on her walls even show up on the walls of Richard’s apartment (which sits stage left, like Virginia’s study).
It’s in the metaphysical that each woman’s world bleeds into the other. When Virginia asks her maid, Nelly, if it’s believable for Dalloway to kill herself, Laura in her kitchen is swept up by the same bobbing movement of the river as the dancers across the stage. The chorus exists across all of the women’s world, with costumes in period styles from each of the opera’s three eras present throughout. If the dancers are a visual Greek chorus, then the chorus is a - well - choral one. They make each woman’s subtext text, only really existing as people in the physical world as Clarissa makes her morning passage through Washington Square Park.
When Virginia and Laura are both failing in their acts of creation, Laura’s cake going wrong and Virginia’s novel getting away from her, the dancers and the orchestra come together to underscore it; dancers steal bowls and pens from the women’s hands and toss them around as the timpani pounds, Laura’s panic and Virginia’s headaches made manifest. It’s a moment that captures losing control so perfectly that it made me weep.
(An aside, but I always appreciate the timpani as an expression of agony, because agony is what I felt as a Mahler bim bom child when they set us up on risers right behind the percussion section and a symphony member looked at us with a smirk as they put in earplugs just before the timpani player really WENT FOR IT and HONORED a fortissimo. Anyway.)
I love sweet, gentle souls who go to see art fresh and unknowing, like the person next to me at American Ballet Theatre’s Giselle who audibly went, “ohhh no no NO!!” when Isabella Boylston picked up the sword in the mad scene. I want to hug everyone who softly gasps when Richard tumbles out of the window in Act 2; they’re so innocently unspoiled in their reaction. In this moment the film, Philip Glass’ score stings as Meryl Streep screams, but Puts opts for silence in the orchestration - leaving Ketelsen’s and Fleming’s voices undressed and aching - until Clarissa looks up to notice Richard is gone. There are quiet strings and piano of realization, until the reality of what has happened blooms into choral, brass, and timpani despair.
It’s not all darkness and personality disorders, though. Clarissa indulges a crush on flower shop owner Barbara, the chorus and dancers surrounding them with luscious pink and red flowers as Clarissa fantasizes about spending the rest of the day kissing Barbara among the petals. The dancers waltz around Laura and Kitty as they share a back and forth love duet before Laura kisses Kitty (to disastrous effect). Virginia rapturously recalls the excitement of London, which might be a manic moment more than a joyful one. It’s a moment of respite from heaviness all the same.
It’s obvious this is a second run for the returning company - everyone’s had time to live in these roles and let them settle into their voices. Kelli O’Hara is silvery and fluttering in voice and acting, with a sly sense of witty self-deprecation underneath Laura’s depression and yearning. Joyce DiDonato may be one of our greatest singing actors, not just in opera, but all theatre. Her rich low range and tactile acting make Virginia’s demons palpable. And RENÉE! No one shapes a phrase like her, and her iconic pianissimos are as heartbreaking as ever. It’s a welcome change to see Fleming sing someone immediate and truly contemporary after all of her iconic lyric roles. Fleming is especially affecting working with Ketelsen - their scenes are tender and personal, and I understand why Clarissa loves Richard so much more than I did in the film.
Fleming is equally present and vulnerable in her scenes with Denyce Graves’ Sally, who is criminally underused. Sylvia D'Eramo’s Kitty gives Toni Collette a run for her money, and her Vanessa is a steady counterpoint to Virginia’s mania. Sean Panikkar’s anchoring and mostly stolid Leonard makes his moments of fear that Virginia has escaped halfway through her day to end her life all the more impactful. Nelly (Eve Gigliotti) is more three-dimensional than any of Virginia’s several maids in the movie, and any time two mezzos get to sing together, I’m full, “let’s go, girls.” I’ve long called Dan Brown the ultimate himbo, and Brandon Cedel is so charming, affable, and in love with Laura that you almost feel bad knowing she’s going to leave him. The Man Under the Arch/Hotel Clerk - a representation of death lingering at the edges of this day in all three women’s lives - is shared by John Holiday and Eric Jurenas this run; I LOVE countertenors, and Holiday and Jurenas soar as their voices intermingle with the women. Kathleen Kim doubles as the coloratura flower shop owner, Barbara, and Richie Brown’s babysitter, Mrs. Latch. If Kathleen Kim has no fans, that means I am no longer on earth. If the world is against Kathleen Kim, then I am against the world. Let’s all get together later and pay $14.99 for the Met on Demand app so we can watch her and Joyce DiDonato in Cendrillon.
Richard is Septimus as much as he’s Virginia, two men who can’t cope with what’s been left of their bodies and minds after being torn apart by war and AIDS. Every iteration of The Hours reminds us that the Richard Clarissa first fell in love with was a vibrant, brilliant, healthy young man, but here we actually see him as he was: fresh and clean in a varsity jacket on a beach. Richard, Clarissa, and Louis (William Burden) show us that morning on the beach that Clarissa and Richard cling to and that haunts Louis, a billowing and breezy white veil behind them. It’s a bittersweet LGBTQ love triangle trio for the ages. (Please let me pretend it’s synergy that one could, in theory, see The Hours at the Met and Challengers at the Lincoln Square AMC in one day, which certainly is not an idea I entertained doing as a bit).
This opera is queer in a way the movie seemingly couldn’t be in 2002. Clarissa and Sally share domestic intimacy. Clarissa and Laura each daydream of disappearing into the softness and beauty of another woman’s arms (a lot of people talk about The Hours without talking about how GAY it is, which makes me feel straight up - pun intended - gaslit, because the idea of caressing another woman in a flower shop and bidding another woman’s softness goodbye is like, did Sappho herself write this??). Laura’s desire for Kitty is reciprocated, the moment after their kiss only broken when Kitty notices Richie watching. Virginia’s queerness isn’t written into the book, movie, or opera, but Nicole Kidman’s Virginia never mentions Sally Seton. DiDonato’s dreams up Mrs. Dalloway’s love from long ago while Clarissa ponders her relationship with her own Sally. Meryl Streep’s Clarissa introduces aged Laura Brown to her “friend,” while Fleming’s Clarissa introduces Laura to her partner, Sally.
And then there’s that cake. The cake that Laura throws away because she can’t get it right and because she’s losing the woman she loves and because she fears she’ll be forever trapped playing house when she just wants to disappear with Kitty. The cake that Laura and Richie can’t get right together in a 1940s suburban nuclear family. Then, another cake, so many years later, that’s the first thing Laura sees in Clarissa and Sally’s apartment. Laura has to see the cake, and she has to see Clarissa and Sally holding hands. She has to know that you can have the cake - joy, contentment, comfort, being seen - and have them with a woman. Is this just my personal queer reading? I don’t know, maybe. Do I identify too much with Laura Brown because I fear that in 1949, I’d have ended up married to a man I didn’t want, unable to be with the women I did? Absolutely. I have also, present day, sobbed by the frozen foods, so there’s that. Art is what you MAKE OF IT, baby!
The Hours makes me cry. But I can find a way to cry at any live performance (it was a shock to learn other people did not sob at the musical Head Over Heels, for example). This piece feels different, though. When Virginia realizes that Clarissa Dalloway will not die, but that “proud, common Clarissa will soldier on,” Sally holds Clarissa Vaughn downstage center, and I’m weeping in my seat somewhere in the house. It’s enough to be proud and common. It’s enough to love and be loved and give and take and lose. We soldier on in the face of it, even as loss and grief remind us to value life more.
People complain about The Hours, in general, being about women but written by men. It’s certainly true of the opera, as the only woman member of the creative team is Annie-B Parson, with thanks to Renée Fleming’s efforts. I suppose I understand but don’t agree with this criticism, if you see The Hours as strictly about women in distress - how reductive it must seem for men to write yet another portrayal of women losing it - but The Hours is so much more than just that. It’s connection and seeing each other for all the tiny ways we’re similar. After all, we are not alone, as the final trio reminds us.
That trio. It’s sat with me since 2022. I’ve sought out Youtube bootlegs of the radio broadcast performances just to hear it over and over before the live recording was released. It’s haunting and stirring and gorgeous and reverent. Renée was right to envision a whole opera out of this. There’s something about being reminded we’re part of each other and people we’ve never met. I don’t know if Laura, Clarissa, and Virginia are singing to us, or if Kelli, Renée, and Joyce are. I don’t know if I care. Early in the opera, Laura tries to steady herself with a fearful reminder that, “this is the world, and you live in it.” By the end, all three women are together saying, “here is the world.” It’s become a gift for us, for them. We’re all in that great big barn of the Met’s house or up on that impossibly huge stage, and we all get to have the experience together. Renée Fleming likes to proudly share that 40% of the audience for the first run of The Hours hadn’t been to the Met before. I was part of that group, and now I go so often that I get texts promising me a handsome hat or a handy umbrella in exchange for a $150 donation. It’s the magic of that trio, of chasing the feeling of holding my breath until the last bell in the orchestra fades away, that keeps me coming back.
I read a comment on a promotional video of the trio that questioned how the thought, “and you try…” ends. Babe, you TRY. It doesn’t need an ending. All any of us can ever do is wake up and try, then try the day after that, then the day after that. We’re shaped by the hours rewatching old movies, sitting in the dark crying at the opera, and sharing the huge-insignificant-small-earth shattering moments with the people we love and the people we’ve never met. All of the hours add up to something: to the sum of our lives, to the sum of our legacies, to the sum of the world. Here is the world. Here are The Hours. How wonderful it is to live in it.
As of press time (lol, lmao, “press time” is when I finally counted to three and hit publish on this after fretting over it for weeks), there is one final performance of The Hours at the Met: tonight, 5/31 at 7 pm. I’ll be there, peering down from the balcony boxes and peering back at the crowd, marveling that we’re all together on a luminous New York night in almost-June. You can revisit the 2022 production of The Hours in live audio recording wherever you listen to music or in live HD recording on the Met On Demand streaming service ($14.99 a month after a 7 day free trial - not an ad, but open to collaboration). If you know someone who loves The Hours as much as I do (not possible tbh), share this with them, why don’t you. Thanks for reading, love you, mean it, buy the flowers.