ABSTRACT
True enough, the glittering seasons during which, in the space of a year, audiences frequenting New York’s Lincoln Center witnessed no fewer than three major productions of Shakespeare adaptations, could by themselves have occasioned an article such as this one. 1 Ushering in the New Year in 2012, The Enchanted Island, a specially commissioned nouveau Baroque pastiche opera, permitted Prospero’s pilfered domain to entertain not only its familiar dramatis personae and uninvited guests from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, but also an imperious Neptune in the guise of tenor Plácido Domingo, who, having impersonated explorers, kings, and, most famously, Shakespeare’s Moorish-Venetian general, could at last play himself, a musical god. May saw the revival of Kenneth MacMillan’s choreography of Sergei Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet, the most often performed of all Shakespeare ballets, staged with the innovative twist of having many of the American Ballet Theatre’s principal dancers taking the lead roles on successive nights. 2 The most anticipated event of the new season commencing in the fall was the Met premier of one of the few twenty-first-century operas to claim a place in the permanent repertoire, Thomas Adès’s The Tempest, a close adaptation (containing minor verbal quotations and extended musical ones) of the inaugural play bound into the 1623 First Folio.
