I Puritani

The Metropolitan Opera

Lincoln Center, NYC

December 31, 2025 – January 18, 2026

⭐️⭐️⭐️

 

“Let me hope again or let me die”

-Elvira

It’s 4pm on New Year’s Eve and I am finishing a solo brunch at my local all-American Allswell which is unusually festive with the bar bedecked in glittering streamers and disco balls shining from the ceiling as they prepare for the evening’s countdown. I’m awaiting word from my date for the night: he’s stranded in Palm Beach due to the freezing conditions in NYC and quite possibly air traffic from the earlier Zelensky-Trump meeting at Mar-A-Lago. Will he or won’t he make it to the unusually early 6pm curtain time at the Lincoln Center? 

 

Ready with my outfit and make-up planned, I relax at the bar. I subscribe to the motto, “New year, new dress,” and have eagerly awaited this day to don my short, sequined number that Taylor Swift wore to her Jimmy Fallon interview in the Fall and stocked by none other than Annie’s Ibiza (now open in SoHo, NYC). But with temperatures clocking in at feels-like 11 degrees and snow on the way by nightfall, I had decided on a black, floor length, fully sleeved GANNI dress in theme for the evening’s I Puritani premier at the Met Opera.

 

I look up the reviews of past iterations.This is a brand new production but it’s Belinni’s final opera and always had mixed reviews and interpretations since its original premiere in 1835. No one can decide whether the play favors the loyalists or the Puritans. But one thing is for sure…there are three, yes 3 madwoman scenes!! After watching his La Sonnambula earlier this year with similar less than feminist hijinks, I wonder if this will stand the test of time. 

 

Still waiting for news on my date, I then go to download my tickets, and lo and behold discover I have reserved the entire first box in the Dress Circle for the evening. Panic ensues.  I text my date. He responds that he actually made it on a flight and can meet me there. I ask him to invite friends. He doesn’t respond. Time for a round of cell phone roulette. I frantically text everyone in my phone who I know doesn’t have plans and ask if they want to attend an opera that starts in less than two hours with a runtime that ends two and half hours before midnight. My good friend responds and says he can bring another guy friend as well. And so I find myself in a box with three single guys on NYE. How could this be bad??

 

I Puritani, I discover, is an odd choice for the New Year’s Eve Gala. More somber than celebratory. Described in one word: the costumes, the set lended to “pious” when the mood should have been “partaaay.”

Act I

The stark staging does nothing to showcase the Met’s majesty. A staid, wooden parliamentary set that alternated as puritanical gallows makes you believe the rumors that the Met has fallen upon hard times. But the singing is the showcase here with the three male leads reaching ultimate heights and Bellini’s commitment to writing vocal theatrics for his original all-star cast fully on display with this cadre of new stars, two (Lisette Oropesa as Elvira and Tony Stevenson as Bruno) being graduates of the Met Opera’s Lindemann Young Artists in Residence program. 

 

The scene at intermission is old school and the preparations for the gala are already underway. Only the head of the Young Associates program is visible amongst the tourists in the throng although the evening is hardly sold out.

 

Acts II and III

I usually leave at intermission for operas that are not my steeze but my impromptu compatriots wanted to persist and I am so glad we did. The best singing was yet come and now it had arrived. The summary? Woman goes cray-cray with a crayon. Best mad scene ever. Then, dueling baritones compete vocally in the name of the Cromwell crown and bring down the house. 

 

After a brief pause where a summary of the next milestones lay in the English Civil War are projected into the screen, the lovers reunite for a masterful duet and repeated turns of plot that leave us all winded. Yes, the battle was raging and the use of shadow loomed large but is a poor substitute for sumptuous sets.

 

Unless you are an opera diehard, I suggest you drink a Bellini rather than watch an opera from his namesake