Heartbeat Opera’s ‘Salome’ Dares Us to Look

Almost everyone in Salome wants something they shouldn’t. A king desires his stepdaughter, a servant desires a princess and a princess desires a prisoner with equal parts fascination and repulsion. We, too, look upon them all with horror and a shameful allure, seduced as much by Strauss’s score as by Salome herself. It is a nasty piece of work but a depiction of desires too powerful to be contained.

Strauss’s opera, an adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s shocking play, is about desire and depravity, but even more so, it’s about the gaze. The first scene, with Narraboth (here sung by a sterling-voiced David Morgans) and the page, establishes the central question. What does the desiring gaze do to the object of its fascination? The moon is a beautiful princess. No, she’s a dead woman. Salome’s interest in Jokanaan expands on it. Jokanaan’s eyes are like clusters of grapes. No, they’re like writhing vipers. Everyone speaks in similes that transform their objects. This transformation can be as beautiful as it is violent, imposing a new shape on another person.

By the end of Heartbeat Opera’s sly, brilliant new production by Elizabeth Dinkova, it’s very clear that everyone in Salome’s horrifying incestuous family is responsible. If she’s a monster, it’s because they looked upon her and made her into one.

Salomé is a challenge for a small opera company for both practical and political reasons. The practical: how to slim down a huge Strauss orchestra to fit in a small theater. The political: what to do with the opera’s centerpiece and centerfold, the Dance of the Seven Veils, which leaves Salome nude before Herod and us all. Heartbeat, never ones to play it straight, has found ingenious solutions to both.

For the former, music director Dan Schlosberg (perhaps the wittiest arranger of his generation) has rescored the opera for eight clarinets, most doubling or tripling on other wind instruments and a percussion team that includes both chimes and bells and drumset. It’s crazy—crazy like Aubrey Beardsley, crazy like Oscar Wilde—and it works, especially as conducted by Jacob Ashworth. For the latter, Dinkova has made the Dance of the Seven Veils an act of defiance. Here Salome doesn’t strip; Herod does. And from then on, everyone dances to the princess’s macabre tune.

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All of this brings me to the biggest challenge of all: who should play Salome, and how? Summer Hassan was an excellent choice, especially with Dinkova’s exciting take on the material. Here, Salome is played young, her styling perfectly stomach-churning. Dressed in a corset top and a flouncy pink tutu, she could be anywhere from six to sixteen. She often hides under tables or crawls on all fours like a dog. Salome is a woman disguised as a girl—and a girl whose womanhood is forced onto her by the lusts of others. Hassan was by turns bratty and beguiling, her voice voluptuous and vicious. Her final scene with the (very realistic) severed head was magnificently disgusting. At one point, she pushes her fingers into its bloodied mouth in a moment more shocking and visceral than the kiss we all know is coming. Hassan herself seemed close to vomiting.

Her fascination with Jokanaan, who appears in grubby briefs and a torn polo shirt with eyes red and swollen, feels more like a response to her horrendous family circumstances; tired of being looked at by men, she fixates on a man who is powerless to stop her gaze. When he looks back, with hatred tinged by lust, she crumbles. Nathaniel Sullivan, as Jokanaan, has a healthy, impassioned sound (it helps that his character has the loveliest music that Strauss can muster). His Jokanaan is tempted by the princess against his will and judgment. He only narrowly resists her and welcomes the headman as his punishment.

Herod doesn’t try to resist Salome and is completely undone by his desire for her. Sung in a marvelous and utterly vanity-free performance by baritone Patrick Cook, this king is even more effete and mewling than ever before. Herod here is a pathetic pedophile, humorous in his cartoonish leering and indecisive weakness. Cook is revolting, and he’s impossible to look away from. His wife, Herodias, an elegant and supple-voiced Manna K. Jones, stands in contrast to her husband; she’s the only character who can see things clearly. To her, the moon is just the moon, Jokanaan is just a dangerous political prisoner who should be removed. But she is canny enough to know how powerful the force of the desiring gaze can be. She may not like how Herod leers at her child, but she will use it to her advantage.

Dinkova is attuned to the operations of the gaze in the text and in the opera house. Narraboth surveils everyone, especially Salome, on security cameras that show us spaces beyond the opera house. Jokanaan’s prison is a glass box in the center of the stage. We can see right through it to his painfully bare legs, and his beheading is only hidden by a blanket. The moments before his execution, where he nods assent to Jeremy Harr’s servant-cum-executioner, were among the most affecting.

Dinkova also makes a big point by ensuring that the audience sees more of the male body than the female one. Herodias is covered from head to foot in yellow satin, Salome in pink tulle with bike shorts underneath. Jokanaan is dressed in grubby briefs and a torn polo shirt, which he removes to wash himself. Herod sings the latter half of the opera in his underwear.

During the Dance of the Seven Veils, all the characters end up inside Jokanaan’s prison cell, where we see them writhe in an orgy behind glass and under the camera’s unblinking gaze. In the end, the page (an affecting and increasingly outraged Melina Jaheris) shoots the whole family, not just Salome. They’re all complicit. After all, the gaze requires more than one person, the viewer and the viewed.

Heartbeat’s productions of canonical works are required viewing for a reason. Their relentless innovation and light-handed flexibility with the operatic canon mean that they can take their texts even more seriously than a traditional production. By letting these operas change, they grant these pieces a different kind of power and allow them truly modern force. Dinkova dares us all to objectify Salome; just try it, and you’ll end up exposed yourself.