beautiful photographs, eh opera

I incorrectly typed in the name of my blog and MSN pulled up this as a possible site: No_clever_names_left. There is a dark beauty in these photos that mesmerizes me. Flickr is a wonderful thing.

I went to The Marriage of Figaro Tuesday night. I must be fair and state that most of my disappointment in the complete experience was venue management related, not performance related. As far as the performance went, it was nice. The setting and the sound made it hard to get into, but it was nice enough.

The tickets say "no late seating" and, to paraphrase Fezzik, I do not think it means what I think it means. The house lights go down, the overture begins, people are still coming through the doors. Five minutes go by, still people come. The overture comes to a close, performers on stage, the ushers are still letting people enter. What I take from this is that "no late seating" at the Cobb Energy Center means "no matter what's happening on stage and ignoring that the seating area is pitch black, come on up and we'll let you try to find your seat".

Poorly mic'ed performers (I won't say it's bad acoustics because there was no distortion in sound. There simply wasn't sound where there should have been - the mouths were moving, but no notes were reaching my ears). Monochromatic staging, relatively stagnate blocking, pretty costumes.

My favorite moment: the final octet is on stage singing away and, what I can hear, it is lovely. Near the end, a decorated screen drops down, mid-stage, behind the performers. Is it a "the end" image or something else vaguely related and seemingly appropriate? Not really... It is a huge picture of the composer himself, with his name written under the image. Because, you know, for a minute there, I was thinking "Who wrote this? Schumann? Handel? Prokofiev?" Thank goodness this screen was there to tell me it was Mozart.

Now, I know there's likely some excellent "art direction" behind this. You know, like they took inspiration from the first performance of the opera in 1786 which (could have, but I don't think so) ended with a big-ass poster of Mozart dropping into the background. Regardless of the inspiration, it seemed silly.

I feel comfortable now with my long-held antagonism towards the Atlanta Opera. Though, not it's not so much antagonism as a quiet resignation. A resignation that I will now spend too much money to fly to Dallas (and maybe other places) to see a wonderful opera production. A production in a theater where "no late seating" does mean what I think it means and where the performers, in all moments quiet or loud, can be heard.