Blog Ok, Operas are Terrible

i mean, they suck, bad. i didn't get it, didn't wanna get it. couldn't get into it at all. and i should've known, too, cos i hate musicals on television. well, that's not true. i hate the singing parts of musicals, which is a shame cos normally the stories are pretty entertaining. this makes movies like The Sound of Music problematic to watch, cos the plot is good, which keeps me tuned in to the agony of various characters breaking out in song for no reason whatsoever.

the trouble is, i like realism. that's one of the yardsticks i use to measure whether a film is good. and when random people are doing real life things on-screen and suddenly stop what they're doing to sing, in broad daylight and in public, with those around them joining in, it's not terribly realistic.

so no, i don't like musicals, which means i should've known i'd hate operas, cos an opera is a musical with the plot taken out. it's just the singing, the part i don't want. and it's hrs and hrs of this. operas are the only form of entertainment i can think of where you enjoy the intermission. you actually want it to last longer.

opera theaters must have really bad business people behind them, cos given how much demand there is to get OUT of watching what's going on on-stage, the concession area should have far more variety and charge far more money than it does. this is a total missed opportunity. when i asked the kid working the counter why this was, he laughed, which means even he got it. i told him he should go to business school.

on a positive note, my opinion of julia roberts as an actor has gone way up, cos her pretending to like that opera in Pretty Woman was one hell of a performance.

What opera did you see?
I have a friend who works for lincoln center and he got free tickets a while ago to the met. Which is meant to be one of the best opera companies. I slept straight through the second half and only woke up when people started clapping. it was a pretty bare opera though, there are other ones id be interested to see because of the music or the staging, like the nose had looked really cool. Im always down if im offered a free ticket, but I cant imagine paying the type of money people pay just to sleep through it. Id rather see the philharmonic.

Madame Butterfly, supposed to be a classic. tickets run as as low as $20, as high as $410 if you sit with the orchestra or what they call the parterre. i got us seats on the dress circle, paid $120 per ticket. never again!

this is the seating chart for the theater:

it was 3+ hrs of this shit, too. operas are long as hell.

Oh God, it was some new kind of awful. I've never experienced anything quite like that. It was like being encarcerated. We had fun, though, trying to find ways to discuss how bad it was without interrupting the old folks around us who were thoroughly enjoying the performances. I think we must've spent 2 and 1/2 of the 3 hours that thing ran trying to keep down the noise from us laughing. At one point Chris said something about, "if I had known it wasn't going to rain, we could've spent 3 hours walking around the city instead of doing this." A few couples heard me laughing at that. I confess. And I don't think it was a stage in the show that was meant to be funny. If you ever go to a formal event that's just ridiculously boring, don't take Chris with you, or cover your ears. He just wouldn't stop going off on this horrific "ordeal" we were going through.

the most damning part of this crap is that we could've gotten in free. there's like no security at the door. i don't know if someone was sick or what but i was expecting an opera to be brimming with beverly hills types with parasols and those white gloves that run up to your elbows, so i was also expecting maximum security at the gate to keep out the riff raff. i was seriously expecting to see CIA types with those ear pieces with the cord dangling down.

there was like no one guarding entry once the crap started. maybe they wanted to keep the doorways free for people rushing to get the hell outta there.

about an hr into the show we almost called shanni and told her to hurry down. she could've just walked right in. and there were some empty seats around us, which was really no surprise, frankly.

what deleted user liked my post?

lol, that's fantastic. we've got a phantom on LG.

Haha, you should've, though I was still at dinner around 8:30ish

if you had come down, i'd have gotten the hotel to switch our room to a double bed, so you could've just crashed with us afterward. that crap wasn't over till like 11pm and we were starving. boredom works up quite an appetite.

i find it hard to believe every opera ever performed isn't boring

if the theater serves good food and our seats fold out into cots, just in case, i'd be willing to check it out

I wanna go next time. It can't be THAT bad. At least the singing quality would have to be high, right?

Opera's one of those things where I completely admire the technical aspect of it but can't stand watching it for more than 5 minutes.

Yes they're very boring but I do enjoy a good musical.