The Met At The Movies

Here’s a splendid article by Heather Mac Donald for The Weekly Standard on the impact and “added value” (and shortcomings) of Peter Gelb’s Met At The Movies initiative:

These X-rays of performances are not without cost. They break the illusion of the stagecraft and create a Janus-like experience of back-to-back fiction and technical reality. The surreal man-trees in the forest of Hansel and Gretel walk into the wings and remove the branches that sprout out of their big jackets in place of heads. The silent bulbous cooks wait among hanging power cables and electrical panels before gliding onstage with the banquet that director Richard Jones substitutes for Hansel and Gretel's traditional angel dream pantomime. Conceivably, after hearing the stage manager cue the company a few more times, the movie-house viewer will yearn for a pure frontal experience of opera again, without seams and armature.

For now, however, the Met's breakthrough venture into movie production has expanded not just its audience but the experience of opera as well. And audiences are eating it up. There was hardly a seat to be had at the Irvine broadcasts in January. A patron who has been attending the shows since last year predicted that the line for La Bohème in April would begin forming three hours before the show began.

RTWT here.