“There is plenty of credit to spread around for the production’s success, but the evening’s obvious centerpiece is soprano Emma McNairy’s breathtakingly fine performance in the title role.



The challenges of this assignment are legion. As the embodiment of sexual enchantment, of fundamental and amoral urges, Lulu is the object of everyone else’s desire without existing as a character in her own right. Yet Berg gives her the opera’s most ardent and expressive vocal writing, a demanding and extended stream of melody that is at once angular, forceful, and glitteringly alluring.

It falls to the soprano to bridge that gap — to uncover the gleaming sensuality that lies just below the surface of Berg’s twelve-tone musical language — and McNairy did that flawlessly. She caressed and cajoled the notes until they shimmered; she unleashed potent, high-flying bursts of fine-tuned melody then dropped into conversational stretches of pointed eloquence.



And in a superb bit of theatrical jujitsu, McNairy took the physical degradations of the assignment and turned them back onto the world. Director Elkhanah Pulitzer was merciless in what she required of McNairy, from complete onstage nudity to extravagantly detailed simulations of sex, and from each one McNairy emerged even more dignified and assured.”