The Metropolitan Opera: Dead Man Walking Movie Free Watch Online

Based on Sister Helen Prejean's memoir about her fight for the soul of a condemned 3 murderer, Dead Man Walking matches the high drama of its subject with ..

NEW YORK — It’s no spoiler to let slip that Joseph De Rocher — the titular “Dead Man Walking” of composer Jake Heggie’s opera, which opened the Metropolitan Opera season on Tuesday — dies in the end. But this looming inevitability did little to quell the shock that registered across the house over its (forgive this) execution. More on this shortly. Heggie’s 2000 adaptation of Sister Helen Prejean’s best-selling 1993 memoir (which became an Oscar-winning 1995 film) has made a long and largely successful journey to its company premiere at the Met. Prejean, now 84, served as a spiritual adviser for two death row inmates at the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola. Originally slated for the 2020-2021 season but postponed by the pandemic, the show’s arrival this season now serves to reaffirm the Met’s post-covid-shutdown commitment to stage more contemporary works — and hopefully fill more seats. “Dead Man Walking” could very well deliver on the latter. Ivo van Hove’s new production is spare and unsparing, its action unfolding within an unadorned holding room designed by Jan Versweyveld and flooded with garishly hued light. Now and then, a roving crew of camera operators appear (quite conspicuously) onstage to feed close-ups of the singers to a massive cubic screen suspended over the stage like a colossal industrial vent. Sans cells, bars or chains, the effect of this wide-open stage and free-roaming staging remains one of inescapable confinement. Even Heggie’s music — a roiling and often thrilling concoction of Britten-esque strings and Gershwin-esque winds, commandingly conducted by music director Yannick Nezet-Seguin — leaves little room for daylight. Attempts by the audience to applaud several arias were thwarted by Heggie’s relentless score, insistently ushering us toward De Rocher’s fate and allowing zero opportunities for the illusion to loosen. Heggie’s music rushes between evocations of the cold, mechanistic bureaucracy of capital punishment and the internal anxiety and turmoil of its protagonists. It could be this engineered sense of captivity that allowed mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato’s turn as Sister Helen to achieve such flight. This is, to be sure, DiDonato’s show: She barely ever leaves the stage, the action never escapes her purview, and she’s as bound to her sense of divine duty to De Rocher as De Rocher is to the consequences of his crime.