If you’re a hard-core opera buff who finds the Met’s flashy sets and costumes distracting, have I got a show for you!
It’s called “The Blind,” and for the duration of this hourlong Lincoln Center Festival presentation, the audience sits blindfolded and sightless as the opera is sung all around them.
Call it a switcheroo on “Sleep No More.” Instead of the off-Broadway hit’s non-verbal, visually rich environment, “The Blind” is all about what is heard but not seen.
Composer Lera Auerbach adapted the work from the 1890 play by Maurice Maeterlinck. It’s a creepy tale of a group of blind people taken out on a day trip, then left behind by their caregiver, an elderly priest.
Though the 1994 score is a cappella — a dozen voices, with no orchestra behind them — Auerbach creates a disquieting mood with choral muttering of Latin prayers, interrupted by panicky solo cries of realization that the priest may never return.
Director John La Bouchardière’s dramatic concept is mostly effective: Sitting there in the tiny Kaplan Playhouse with mysterious voices swirling around me, I felt blind, all right — vulnerable and strangely alone.
He goes too far, though, in layering on special effects: wafting sickly-sweet incense to indicate the smell of flowers, and cranking up the room’s air conditioning to suggest a chilly sea breeze. That’s cheesy, more suited to a haunted house than an opera house.
The best part of the performance, though, was one most likely to be overlooked. As blindfolded audience members were guided to their seats, Auerbach’s 1992 composition “After the End of Time” looped on the sound system as a kind of overture.
Weird electronic moans and reverbing women’s voices so powerfully evoked a mysterious empty landscape that the opera proper came as a bit of a letdown.
Still, even temporary membership among “The Blind” does perk up the hearing, making every murmur of the score sound acute.
And once the blindfold is off and you emerge into Lincoln Center . . . how bright the lights look!