This is based on the play by John Patrick Shanley about a Catholic school in 1964 where the principle starts to suspect that the pastor is a pedophile. But! She might be wrong. I was actually somewhat familiar with the story already: I saw an actual production of the play back in the day, as well as the movie version starring the late great Philip Seymour Hoffman. Which one was better? I...cannot even begin to remember. So that was helpful!
I saw this now--from the Minnesota Opera, where it originally debuted--because it's on PBS just until the twelfth, so didn't want to miss it. Then, I saw that there was actually no time pressure because someone had uploaded a copy to youtube. So I watched a really good opera for NOTHING! What a waste!
I'm actually not sure whether the central drama here one hundred percent works for me: because for most of the runtime, the principle, Sister Aloysius, thinks Father Flynn is molesting their first black student based on NOTHING. It's ridiculous. She seems to have the idea that because he has long fingernails and likes sugar in his tea and enjoyed secular Christmas songs, he's some sort of sybarite and therefore he must be a child molester. QED. The other piece of evidence is that the child in question, Donald Miller, was taken from his class one day and came back acting odd, his breath smelling of alcohol. But the given explanation, which everyone confirms, is that he was caught drinking communion wine and was upset over that, which is an obvious, natural explanation and what kind of lunatic would instead jump to "the priest must've been getting him hammered so he could molest him?" Seriously. Later, on Aloysius calls Flynn's previous precinct, and it seems like he's bounced around from district to district, which DOES seems suspicious, but it's just hard not to realize, okay, but she did this calling based on absolutely NOTHING. It doesn't validate anything that came before. You can't just spend the whole time presenting no evidence and then present evidence at the very end and say "see? The fact that there was evidence at the end proves that there was evidence the whole time." No it doesn't. I mean sure, at the end we learn that Sister Aloysius isn't actually as sure about his guilt as all that, but...I don't know if that's really enough.
That was a negative assessment, so it sounds kind of weird to say that I got involved in the drama regardless, but so I did, helped along by dramatic music that at times does indeed seem to demonstrate the concept of "doubt" in operatic form. And that's to say nothing of the excellent acting that we get. I especially want to highlight Denyce Graves as Donald's mother: she only gets one scene, but with all due respect to the rest of the cast, with that one scene she absolutely steals the show. While watching, I thought that she sounded for all the world like a contralto, but then I checked afterwards and saw that she identifies as a mezzo-soprano: well, maybe my ear is off, or maybe it makes you more marketable to be labeled a mezzo, but whatever she is, her voice is very distinct and very forceful.
Another good contemporary opera. Of course, it's impossible to know what will and won't endure over the years and centuries (I mean, even assuming society does), but it's definitely noticeable that even though opera obviously has a less prominent cultural role than it once did (in spite of which, it's interesting to note that I've seen significantly more operas from the 2010s than any other single decade), artistically speaking, as a genre it's still in pretty darn good shape.
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