Religious opera!

Haven't been to the opera in a while, happy to have got tickets for the Metropolitan Opera's new production of John Adams' "El Niño" last night. The opera/oratorio, loosely inspired by Handel's "Messiah" and the medieval miracle plays in which western theater begins, and interleaved with Latin American poetry (and a little Hildegard of Bingen and Martin Luther!), is a retelling of the cosmic miracle of the Nativity of Christ featuring not just one, not just two but five Marys. Two - a soprano and a mezzo-soprano - are in the opera/oratorio as written, but this lush production adds three more, dancers: Indigenous Mary, Tropical Mary and Golden Mary. In a production as visually multi-layered and shimmering as Adams' music, it works - as Mary does in the life of those who revere her - human, local, embodied, immediate but also divine, universal, plural, transcendent.