MET AT THE MOVIES

posted by James Reel

    Last night, my wife and some friends attended the Loft Cinema’s screening of the Met’s high-definition “theatercast” of The Magic Flute. Here in Tucson, we’re on the frontier, which means it takes a few days longer for these newfangled innovations to reach us. Telegraph wires have limited bandwidth. Anyway, I stayed home to continue working my way through Crime and Punishment, but reportedly the affair was a rousing success, with something like 500 people filling the theater. (Not enough hors-d’oeuvres to go around, though, I hear.)
    So this morning people around town may well be thinking, first, “Classical music isn’t dead after all,” and second, “Arizona Opera must be getting pretty nervous with the Virtual Met in town.” But I think it’s too early to make either conclusion.
    First, last night’s screening was a novelty, and it involved a very popular opera. (Glynn Ross once told me that the biggest news to him after a few years of running Arizona Opera was that he could actually fill the house with a Mozart opera, not just the usual Verdi and Puccini.) If we had a steady diet of the Met on the silver screen, I wonder if 500 people would be showing up week after week for things like I Puritani and The First Emperor. Maybe they would, but it remains to be demonstrated.
    Second, should Arizona Opera worry that Met screenings would siphon off its audience? Well, that might be an issue if the Met were onscreen here every month, but that isn’t going to happen—at least, there’s no indication of that at the Loft’s Web site, although Phoenix is another story. (You’ll find the Met’s own HD theater schedule here.) Even if it were, I don’t think 30 years of Met telecasts on PBS have cut into Arizona Opera’s audience; if anything, they’ve stirred interest in seeing live productions—visceral, not virtual, opera. And after seeing a few screenings at a big movie theater, a lot of people would probably conclude that 1) the Met’s vocal roster isn’t as stellar as in days of yore, 2) its production styles are not to everyone’s taste, and 3) video tends to emphasize opera’s hokey nature, which is disguised somewhat by all the stage spectacle seen live at some distance in a real opera house.
    So it’s way too soon to make pronouncements about What This Means. Let’s just wait and see—and hope there’s more to see.