Review | An eye-popping ‘El Niño’ at the Met paints the Nativity at grand scale

At once an opera and an oratorio (and yet not quite either), “El Niño” is structured in a sequence of 24 parts that move freely between familiar episodes from the Nativity and selections from Latin American poets, including the 17th-century poet Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, and the 20th-century poets Rosario Castellanos and Gabriela Mistral. An orderly progression of narration, arias and choral passages lend its sometimes-alien soundscape a welcoming shape.

Sometimes these texts deepen the personal drama of the Nativity as well as the physical toll of motherhood — as when Mary sings (in “Se Habla de Gabriel”) of her pregnancy “I felt him grow at my expense” and “steal the color from my blood.”

Other texts widen the frame of the story itself, as in Rosario Castellanos’s “Memorial de Tlatelolco,” which Adams employs to relate Herod’s edict to slaughter Bethlehem’s children with the brutal suppression of student protesters in a 1968 massacre in Mexico City. These outside texts serve to both ground the Nativity in contemporary experience while liberating it from doctrine — or faith, even.

More than anything, this “El Niño” is a feast for the eyes — a radiant vision from director Lileana Blain-Cruz, resident director at Lincoln Center, and one of several Met debuts across the cast and creative team. (Blain-Cruz will also direct the operatic adaptation of George Saunders’s novel “Lincoln in the Bardo” for the Met’s 2026-2027 season.)

At every opportunity, the opera skews optical — sometimes to the detriment of Adams’s music, which several times seemed helplessly anemic against the visual volume of the staging. Trees glide in from the wings and descend from the skies, clumps of hand-painted flora bloom in the corners, long sheets of blue satin become the waves of a surging sea, shooting stars streak overhead. The vibe is both grand and naive; at times, the set feels like an exploded diorama.

Projected textures lend the entire scene an undulating motion, a subtle vivacity that makes the story feel like a living thing. The chorus, outfitted to evoke leaves, adds to this amplified naturalism. And many of the production designs draw from this visceral vocabulary: glaring eyes stud the skies; a pair of descending wings in vascular pink neon descends from the heavens; a vaguely vaginal apparition haunts Joseph in a dream.

Not all of these visual bells and whistles worked. Puppeteers maneuvering the illuminated figure of a young girl holding a star in her hand struggled to keep her head from flickering out. A towering statue of Herod — that doubled as a carriage for his arrival — felt too cumbersome and silly for its payoff. And a center-stage conveyor belt served several expository purposes (Joseph and Mary traversing the desert, for instance) but contributed to a sluggish quality that hampered the production — i.e., lots and lots of slow-walking (a Met favorite).

The kaleidoscopic nature of “El Niño” doesn’t stop at its vibrant colors (the eye-popping work of lighting designer Yi Zhao) and special effects. Adams’s telling of the Nativity splits Mary into multiples. In addition to a “Mary of the Land” (sung by soprano Julia Bullock) and a “Mary of the Sea” (mezzo-soprano J’Nai Bridges), a trio of alternative Marys show up from time to time as icons over the horizon — an “Indigenous Mary,” a “Tropical Mary,” a “Golden Mary” — elegantly (and adventurously) adorned by costume designer Montana Levi Blanco.

The softness and vulnerability of Bullock’s voice cloaks its steely force, especially present in “Memorial de Tlatelolco,” sung over a scaffolding of harps, violent blurts of brass and tense violins.

Bridges brought a more regal bearing to her Mary, her tone velvety and generously full, especially in Castellanos’s “La Anunciación,” atop a tempest of woodwinds and reaching trombones. (Mezzo-soprano Daniela Mack will sing the role May 1 and 4.)

Bass-baritone Davóne Tines inhabited the roles of Joseph, King Herod and the Lord himself (in a bombastic “Shake the Heavens” that felt in spirit like a distant relative of “The Trumpet Shall Sound,” from Handel’s “Messiah”). As Joseph, Tines was a wounded animal, his voice a balled fist of fury. As Herod, comparably overdressed in military regalia and wearing an ash-gray face, he was contemptuous and sinister. His rich, smoky baritone anchored duets with Bullock, who here and there struggled with some of Adams’s more demanding vocal leaps.

A trio of countertenors, Key’mon W. Murrah, Siman Chung and Eric Jurenas, filled several roles: They were narrators. They were the Three Kings. Together they were the angel Gabriel. The presentation of gold, frankincense and myrrh allowed each singer a solo turn (Chung’s silvery instrument was my favorite), but they were most effective when bound in Adams’s sleek harmonies.

Leading the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, conductor Marin Alsop (making her Met debut with this production) emphasized the crisp, scintillating spray of strings, harps and guitar at the oratorio’s outset. She effectively spiked the froth of the seas with bright strings pushing along in driving rhythms. She delivered marvelous nuance and detail — such as the nocturnal oboes threaded through Joseph’s dream. At times, she struggled to fill the space with the more delicate passages of Adams’s score, and now and then, the pace slackened, leaving conspicuous gaps of silence between sections.

The chorus, present onstage for a large part of the performance, was in fabulous form, well-attuned to the rhythmic demands of the score, and easily maintaining the sheen of its more abstract passages. Clusters of dancers sometimes emerged from the chorus, choreographer Marjani Forté-Saunders filling in the oratorio’s occasional blanks with fluid, heavily gestural movement.

This isn’t the type of opera you exit, humming a favorite tune, lamenting the fate of a certain character, or buzzing from the thrill ride of a well-crafted emotional arc. If anything, “El Niño” indulges in deep abstraction, as well as a distance that feels (appropriately) liturgical. Blain-Cruz’s immersive vision collapses the distance between heaven and earth, and it feels like a small miracle.

El Niño runs at the Metropolitan Opera through May 17. metopera.org.