Well, via telepresence, anyway:
 
The Metropolitan Opera and Fathom Events have released the list of 
theaters which are participating in this season's live opera 
"moviecasts."
 
In the Ann Arbor/Ypsilanti area, both the Quality 16 and the Showcase
are listed.    ((Yay!!  No more stress about driving to Livonia 
in sloppy winter weather.))
 
Here's the list of theaters:

http://www.fathomevents.com/news/default.aspx?newsid=63
 
Last year I saw four of the "moviecasts."   They rank among the 
best times I have ever had watching opera, and also among the 
best times I have ever had in a movie theater.
 
These will be on 8 Saturday afternoons, between December and April.
If they follow last season's pattern, there should be repeat 
broadcasts for most of the programs.

39 responses total.

sounds neat!

The repeat performances are on the schedule already -- most will be 
at 3 pm Sunday, the day after the live Saturday afternoon broadcast.
 
Here's the lineup:

"Romeo & Juliette" by Gounod -- with Anna Netrebko, but without the 
         promised Rolando Villazon, who has cancelled all his 
         Met appearances this season.   ???  They don't have a 
         replacement Romeo yet.   This is a blow to the Met; 
         reportedly, Villazon and Netrebko are so hot together on 
         stage that they have to constantly deny being lovers in 
         real life.

"Hansel & Gretel,"  Humperdinck -- suitable for children but musically
         this is quite satisfying for grownups, a sort of Wagner-lite.
         
"Macbeth," Verdi --  I'm looking forward to this, as I have never seen
         any of the early Verdi operas before.

"Manon Lescaut," Puccini

"Peter Grimes," Britten -- for straight drama, this would be the pick
          of the season.  In a small fishing village, Peter Grimes is
          an outcast fisherman whose last apprentice died
          under mysterious circumstances.

"Tristan & Isolde," Wagner -- Yes, we named our cat after this character.
          I'm not going to suggest a Wagner opera for anyone who doesn't
          already know what they are getting into.  :)
          For one thing, this presentation will be 5 and a half hours...

"La Boheme," Puccini -- This is the perfect opera for anyone who has 
          not seen an opera before.  It's relatively short and the 
          characters and emotions are quite modern -- the story is 
          about the loves and play of a quartet of poor students in Paris.
          This story is supposed to be the foundation of the recent
          musical RENT, which I have not seen.

"Daughter of the Regiment," Donizetti --  This is one of those dramatically
          silly stories which stays alive on the opera stage for the 
          beauty of the singing.  The announced stars are Natalie Dessay,
          who is wonderful, and Juan Diego Florez, the likely new 
          "King of the High Cs" and also a pretty decent actor.
          (If I remember correctly, this was Pavarotti's breakthrough
          role, about 40-45 years ago.)
          "An exceedingly yummy operatic cake," says the preview blurb.

Here's the schedule with the Met's own blurbs, plus dates.

http://www.metoperafamily.org/metopera/broadcast/hd_events.aspx

it sounds kind of pricey though. $22 for an adult. Still cheaper than
actually going to the opera though. 

Thanks for posting this.  Is it advisable to get tickets well in advance?

slynne:  Yeah, $22 is a significant increase from the $18 which was 
last season's price.   
 
remmers:  I do not think it is necessary to get tickets well in 
advance in Michigan.  Last year, I got my tickets two or three days 
before each show, and the only time I had problems was when Livonia
was sold out for EUGENE ONEGIN (with Renee Fleming, the hottest show
last year -- the one I went to see twice) and we ended up with tickets
for Walled Lake instead.   
 
It must be necessary to get very advance tickets in some locations, 
because the Met is trying to sell $125 memberships by offering 
members a window of exclusive ticket sales in early October.

The holiday presentation of Hansel & Gretel may be an issue, because
there are probably going to be lots of kids packed off to see it as 
part of school & community music programs. 

Advance tickets were never needed for the encore presentations,
in my experience last season.   The live screenings were always 
sellouts or close to sellouts, but the encores I saw were never
more than half full.

If eight opera moviecasts were not enough for you...

La Scala, the opera house from Milan, Italy which is sometimes 
considered the most prestigious opera house in the world, is 
launching its own series of opera moviecasts.  These will not 
be done live; these will be previously recorded performances,
transmitted in high-definition to movie theaters at flexible
times.

The series opens on December 5 (confirm date!!!) with a 2006
performance of AIDA, the infamous production in which Roberto 
Alagna walked off the stage.  This moviecast will be of the night
when Alagna did NOT walk out.

La Scala is starting with 56 theaters, 
roughly half of what the Met started with.  Curiously, 
seven of the 56 are in Michigan!   The closest one to Ann Arbor
is the Canton Emagine multiplex; there are also participating 
theaters in Lansing and Novi.   I have no information on 
ticket prices.
 
La Scala is going to do seven moviecasts, so that means there 
will be **15** available between December 2007 and June 2008.

http://www.playbillarts.com/news/article/7323.html
http://www.emergingpictures.com/opera_venues.htm

The two links have differing date information for the AIDA!!!

They made Romeo and Juliett and Hansel and Gretel into operas???

Yes, some time ago.  The French composer Gounod takes the blame 
for ROMEO & JULIET; the great Italian composer Verdi used 
three more Shakespeare plays as the basis for operas, with 
MACBETH, OTHELLO and FALSTAFF.  The Metropolitan Opera will be 
"moviecasting" MACBETH in January.

I shall ask my daughter what she thinks of this business of making
Shakespearian works into operas. She's "into" Shakespeare.

(Shakespeare borrowed the stories for his plays, so why shouldn't people
borrow from him?)

Did he now? Cites please.

 re #11:  Well, obviously there are the histories..

Unluckily for you, I have no idea what you are talking about.

 Richard III?  Henry V?  You've never heard of Shakespeare's plays
 based on the lives of these monarchs?

 He also wrote plays based on the lives of historical figures such
 as Julius Caesar, Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra, etc.

Maybe hera could change her "real name" setting so that 
resp:13 appears as a label on everything she posts.  :)
 
Not that any Grexers outside of my family cares, but here's a 
reminder that the La Scala moviecast of Verdi's AIDA 
will be shown in Canton next Wednesday, December 5.  

Verdi got the material for AIDA from a musical by Elton John 
& Tim Rice.  Verdi was taking a break from cribbing from Shakespeare
at that point in his career.   It's a shame, but truly great
art is totally original.   

I care.  In fact, I think it would be really nice to have a Grex dinner 
gathering before attending a local moviecast at which Leslie could give us 
a little pre-concert insight into the production and music.  You know, 
something to help us opera newbies along. 

Fuck that shit. We had a huge turkey dinner before football tonight. Beat
THAT.

I can beat that but not til Monday night.

Monday night is going to be homemade chicken soup.

Are they going to have elephants onstage and all?

I do not know if this production of AIDA included elephants.
(This was La Scala's opening night from last season, late 2006.)
I wouldn't go expecting elephants.

I won't be able to make it anyway...I just love that Aida calls for live
elephants, even though they're rarely used.

 The only production of Aida I have seen did have live elephants but
 had to be presented in a different venue than usual to accomodate them.

I could digress here into a mention of the Thai Elephant Orchestra, in
which the elephants actually play the instruments.

Or we could digress to when my daughter rode an elephant in Florida!

   ((( now linked between Agora and Music )))

Even more opera moviecasts!!  Now San Francisco Opera is getting into
the game, starting March 2008.  The SFO presentations are to include:

Puccini, LA RONDINE
Puccini, MADAMA BUTTERFLY
Saint-Saens, SAMSON & DELILAH
Mozart, DON GIOVANNI
Mozart, MAGIC FLUTE
Philip Glass, APPOMATTOX   (a new work)

There are a few cast notes in the Gramophone article, but there is no
detailed date information.  Too busy to look for more details now.

One item of note is that San Francisco Opera is going to use a
different digital projection system which is claimed to be brighter
than the one the Met uses.

http://www.gramophone.co.uk/newsMainTemplate.asp?storyID=2929&newssectionID
=1

---

I need to get back and write about about last week's moviecast of 
ROMEO & JULIETTE.

I absolutely LOVE listening to classical music at the Cascades in Jackson,
Michigan. For those of you who don't know, it is a tourist spot where there
is a waterfall that comes down a bunch of "steps" and there is a light show
where the steps change colors. I love the music in the open air. It brings
tears to my eyes and a lump to my throat....and I love the colors! :) There
is no other way to thoroughly enjoy classical music.

And here, all of this time, I thought it was fun to see the DSO at
Orchestra Hall ;)

NO fucking way. slynne, have you ever been to the cascades? I mean,
comparably, it's like having sex in a cardboard box or having sex out int he
open air with fireworks going on.

What kind of a cardboard box?

corrugated?

re #31: A very tiny one, with staples sticking out all over the place, in
below zero weather.

update on resp:6 ::  After lots of web searching and some 
correspondance with the PR firm handling the La Scala opera moviecast
series, the news is that one of the distributors for the La Scala
series dropped out after the first presentation, and so 
this week's TRISTAN & ISOLDE, and the remainder of the series from
La Scala, will not be shown in Michigan.

If you just *have* to see one of the La Scala presentations, the 
nearest participating theater is in Cleveland.  Let me know if 
anyone needs a link to the full list of participating theaters
in the US.

(For those who aren't opera geeks:  La Scala in Milan is often
regarded as the world's premier opera house; its rivals 
would be Covent Garden in London and the Met in New York, and
maybe the Paris Opera.)

The Metropolitan Opera series continues; they presented an 
excellent MACBETH last weekend (I should write a short review)
and next up, in mid-February, is Puccini's MANON LESCAUT.

Opera-movie updates:  Tomorrow is Benjamin Britten's PETER GRIMES from
the Metropolitan Opera, live, 1:30 pm.  The repeat is on Sunday
afternoon.   This is the season's serious drama, about a small fishing
village, and an outcast fisherman whose last apprentice died under
questionable circumstances.  I plan to be at the Quality 16 theater.

I have found a theater in Michigan showing the La Scala opera-movie
series:  it's in Kalamazoo.  We are too jammed up with other events to
get to any of their shows.

The San Francisco Opera series started last weekend; again, we got
squeezed out on time for their showing of Puccini's LA RONDINE.  The MJR
Brighton multiplex is showing the San Francisco series, as well as the
previously-announced Canton Emagine.  SFO tickets are a discount --
$10-$12, ten bucks less than the Met.

The Royal Opera House (Covent Garden) in London has announced a series
of four transmissions from April through June.  Three are ballets; the
one opera will be CARMEN, in late April.  I have not found any theater
information yet.

There will be at least one opera moviecast per week through April. 
Aieeee.

*Outstanding* performance of "Peter Grimes" by the Metropolitan 
Opera today.  A smaller crowd at the Quality 16, because Britten is 
less popular, but the performance was fabulous.

Saturday is the Met's moviecast of Wagner's TRISTAN & ISOLDE, all 
5.5 hours of it.  The Met has had to use four Tristans and two Isoldes
to get through five or six performances in this run -- Tristan #4 will
appear for the first time Saturday.  The show has
had to be halted in mid-performance twice -- once when Isolde #1 
was taken down by an unhappy stomach, and once when Tristan #3 was on 
a piece of scenery which broke and send tumbling into the "prompter's box".
 
So, Saturday offers the potential of seeing a complete trainwreck!
But we will hope they pull it off.     

I was reading a New York Times online article (I think) about the
various problems that have cropped up with the Tristan und Isolde opera.
Something about one show having to employ three different Tristan's one
for each act?

The 2008-2009 season of Metropolitan Opera "moviecasts" starts
on MONDAY, September 22.  They will be broadcasting the Met's opening
night, which will be a Renee Fleming gala.  There will be three 
fully staged, unconnected acts, to show off Ms. Fleming.  

As an opera buff I think this will be an interesting, novel experience,
but I doubt it would work for "the general public," who might 
prefer to see a story with a beginning, middle and end.

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