Critics take ‘Grendel’ to task

East Coast critics generally didn’t take kindly to Elliot Goldenthal’s new opera, “Grendel,” which opened Tuesday at the Lincoln Center Festival in New York. The show, co-commissioned by the festival and Los Angeles Opera, premiered here in June.

“It comes across as convoluted and amorphous, at once pretentious and hokey,” Anthony Tommasini wrote in the New York Times.

“An aesthetic of indulgence governs the whole show, an aesthetic that feels very West Coast, very Hollywood,” Philip Kennicott said in the Washington Post.

The opera “has one overriding flaw: It is all sizzle and no steak,” Fred Kirshnit observed in the New York Sun.

David Patrick Stearns of the Philadelphia Inquirer was an exception: “In comparison to so many well-made, well-mannered operas that have crossed the stage of late, ‘Grendel’ is a fearlessly R-rated pageant with so much to say and so many imaginative ways of saying it that you’re willing to wait until the two-act piece finds its footing somewhere near the end of Act I, particularly with the presence of Eric Owens. In the title role, he is consistently charismatic, theatrically and vocally.”