Monday, October 27, 2025
Beginning its 70th-anniversary season, the Washington National Opera offered up quite the anniversary gift after playing “The Star-Spangled Banner” for the Opera House audience on Oct. 24.
It is Verdi’s “Aida,” an impossible tale of love versus loyalty — and duty versus desire. “The epic drama captures a war between heart and homeland,” we’re told.
We have a princess who loves the prince (he is a war hero and doesn’t love her), and they’re expected to get married. But he loves a foreign woman, a victim of the war, taken prisoner, now an household slave, who is secretly a princess in the enemy country. It’s a classic love triangle that you know will end badly.
The sounds and sights of “Aida” are unforgettable and majestic as the work pushes you to both feel and think.
Under Francesca Zambello’s direction, the singers move around artist RETNA’s hieroglyphic-graffiti-like staging along with Anita Yavich’s costumes. The mixed metaphors conjure a look of some kind of modern-day militaristic theocracy. The traditional work posits the conflict between Egyptians and Ethiopians. The pageantry on stage with such a large chorus is meticulously positioned and showstoping.
Still, it is the dramatic and musical interactions between Aida, played Jennifer Rowley, Amneris, played by Raehann Bryce-Davis, and Radamès, played by Adam Smith, that power this sad, intimate story.
Our war hero Radamès is discovered “inadvertently” sharing military tactics with Aida as her father, now also a prisoner whose true identity is not known. On trial, the still-loving Amneris defends Radamès, who is found guilty and locked in a chamber to die. Aida has hidden herself there and surprises Radamès. There, together, they sing their last, as Amneris sings alone on a state temple.
At Friday’s curtain call, to see the full extent of the cast was impressive indeed. Jennifer Rowley, making her WNO debut, exuberantly thanked the audience. Morris Robinson, who plays the tough, high priest Ramfis, got some extra applause from his WNO fan club.
Moreover, this “Aida” fits our time and deserves the applause.
WNO’s “Aida” runs through Nov. 2 at the Kennedy Center Opera House. Runtime is about three hours and fifteen minutes, including an intermission and two pauses.