Composer Jake Heggie and librettist Terrence McNally somehow wrote a time machine. Dead Man Walking is opera as it was experienced a long time ago: relevant, familiar, and with a tune you can sing in the shower (where it may make you sad.) Once, this might have meant a farce on relations between masters and servants set to a suppressed popular play, but unlike Figaro we don’t have to search for seriousness in Dead Man Walking — it drowns us with a flood of tragedy and morality. Its dry humour, like its few spoken lines, go off like magnums in the desert.
Guns, at a knife fight?!