Political Icons on Stage: Nixon in China at the Met, by Rebecca Y. Kim
The Metropolitan Opera
Saturday, February 5, 2011.
John Adams - conductor
Peter Sellars - director
James Maddalena - Richard Nixon
Janis Kelly - Pat Nixon
Robert Brubaker - Mao Tse-tung
Russell Braun - Chou En-lai
Richard Paul Fink - Henry Kissinger
Kathleen Kim - Chiang Ch’ing (Madame Mao)
Richard Nixon is an unlikely operatic protagonist. Surly and inscrutable, he stands outside a world of lyricism and emotional disclosure. His first stage entrance in Nixon in China is appropriately ironic, as the Spirit of ‘76 descends in life-sized proportions with impossible physics from straight above like a spacecraft. President Nixon had indeed stepped into another world when he visited Communist China in 1972, but in the 1987 opera collaboration by composer John Adams, director Peter Sellars, librettist Alice Goodman, and choreographer Mark Morris, his dramatic journey ventures well beyond historic cultural diplomacy. Nixon’s first steps into China are also his first steps onto the operatic stage, and the parallel journey that unfolds alongside the cultural disorientation of an American in Maoist China circumnavigates the territory of opera itself, through storytelling that is as self-conscious and historically conscientious as its uneasy protagonist.








