Sunday, February 2, 2014

Super Bowl Sunday

February 2nd, 2014

Happy Super Bowl Sunday, and R.I.P. Philip Seymour Hoffman! (I am secretly hoping that he's just gone into hiding with a secret resistance like he does in Hunger Games, so that way he'll come back. I mean seriously. Not even in his fifties! Don't. Do. Drugs.)

Also I have been hearing helicopters all day, though I can't imagine they're for the game. One, it doesn't start until the evening, and two, it's in New Jersey. I know that because I both looked it up and the subway was insanely packed with people scrambling for NJ Transit to make it in time for the game.

Beyond all that seriousness though, twenty people from the house went on a tour at the Metropolitan Opera this morning, and didn't get back until one o'clock at the earliest. My group of ten toured around with a guide named Paul. Paul was an old, talkative man whose motto seemed to be: "You'll have to discern for yourselves after the tour what I've said is fact verses opinion."

The stage is unreal. The picture below (left) is Paul gesturing at a floor plan of the theatre, and the spot that his hand is hovering over is stage left. Center stage is built on top of a giant elevator that sinks into the floor 28 feet, and then stage left and stage right are built so that when Scene 1 disappears below, Scene 2 is already set up in the wings and can be ROLLED ONTO THE STAGE --the whole wing rolled on to show off a second totally built new set for Scene 2! There is a fake wall/curtain set up that actually bisects the main stage into two parts. The back can also roll onto main stage like the wings can, but this one is a rotating stage, too. Basically it's a set put on top a lazy-susan. Also pictured below (left) are the construction crew reassembling a set on the elevator. Pretty much everything is too heavy to carry up by hand, so this is what they do every day.


The Met is a repertoire theatre, which means that at any given time they are running about 5 or 6 different performances at the same time. Kind of like the Stratford Festival in Canada. So these techies are working all the time just taking sets apart and shoving them somewhere in the limited backstage space they actually have, and reassembling them later. So say Madam Butterfly goes on Friday evening. You won't see it scheduled for another 6-7 days because to sing like that at full voice for an entire opera, they need a break! And that's why they put on so many shows at once, so there's still something happening even while one cast is on break. And they plan for their seasons five years in advance. That within itself is tricky because a lot can happen to somebody in five years! Cast members get sick, pregnant, voices change...it takes a lot to plan that far ahead. But they can't do it any later because of how much work everything else is to put together from sets to costumes, etc. 

Look at this stage here. It's HUGE! And they've gotta fill pretty much all of it. In La Boheme, the cafe scene has about 250 people on stage at the same time, all doing different things. It must be crazy! Paul told us that if we've never seen opera and want to check it out, the two shows we must see are La Boheme and Carmen. If we don't like either of those shows, "Then guess what? You don't like opera and it's not for you." 

And here are some renderings (left) for costumes coming up for Werther. The rehearsal space is exactly the same measurements of the stage, so when the set isn't being used up there, sometimes they'll put what they can in the rehearsal space so that actors can always practice being on a raked stage (which means angled downwards so the audience has better sight lines of the action, but it also means the cast is walking slanted the whole show) so that there are no surprises for the performance and the technical people know that everything will work. The chandelier (right) is apparently real. Real in that it works like any chandelier should, though I'd bet they made it there. If he said so I couldn't hear because there were people actually working in the shop and I was in the back for this bit. But still. This thing is taller than we are by half at least!

And here's the house. Part of it--I couldn't get it all because the seating capacity is 3,625 plus 224 standing places in the back. I wonder how often they get a full house? The prices can go from $20 to about $280, too. Right?! Students get crazy discounts though. Rush tickets on weekdays are $20, $25 on weekends, and student prices on special for the best remaining seats in the house are about $55 instead of $280. Therefore, I will be coming back at some point in time to see an opera.

The ceiling has been brushed in 24 karat gold. It's less money to redo the scaffolding on the whole building than to fix that ceiling if it ever needed it. Even though some of the operas are actually in English, the back of every chair still has electronic subtitles that you can choose from 5 languages which translation you want. They put those in because obviously they want patrons to understand what's happening--even for those who are there to listen to music, with the subtitles they can gasp in the right places, laugh, cry, everything--because they can follow the story and not just the action on stage. 

There are two in particular that I'd like to see--La Boheme because I did costumes for it once at McCarter Theatre, I enjoy Rent quite a bit, and Paul told me to; I'd also like to see The Enchanted Island. That one is an adaptation of Shakespeare's Tempest written by the Met staff, and I want to see it because that is my favorite Shakespeare. And who doesn't love a comedy? Fun-haters, that's who.


1 comment:

  1. This is awesome! I've never seen a full curved cyc before. Most stages either aren't big enough, or don't have the line sets to hold it. If you go, tell me all about it!

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