I’m not as big a performance nut as I used to be, but I still collect my pennies for something special when the conditions are right. Usually this means I’m going to an event within a reasonable distance from home, I know how to get there and it doesn’t require a car. God bless public transportation.
For years I’ve enjoyed the opera, but in the past few years I’ve rediscovered the theatre. My introductory theatre college course last spring exposed me to more productions than I would usually attend on my own, and after being saturated with so many offerings onstage I began to wonder which I like more: opera or theatre.
Opera is a bit exclusive in the minds of most people. Even though many of the orchestral pieces we hear everyday on the airwaves come from opera productions, if you ask the average person on the street about them, they probably wouldn’t be able to identify them. A song from a good musical, however, is guaranteed to outlast the production’s shelf life.
Non-musical theatre is sometimes like television without the box. This perspective changes the further you sit from the stage, but usually the action takes place in a huge niche in the wall, and you’re sitting on the outside looking in. If you are exposed to a performance in an open setting, such as a thrust stage in which the audience usually surrounds the performers on all sides, it’s often hard to detach from the action in front of you. That can be disconcerting. I’ve seen three such performances in my life, and only one of them was light enough to be enjoyable. It was a farce featuring prominent actor Louis Jourdan: he actually had a scene in which he ran offstage in his boxers, socks and garters. The other two were the (non-musical) adaptation of Spring Awakening and Othello: sitting through both felt like I was an unwilling witness to behaviors I would normally want to report to the police (both feature death prominently), so I guess this style isn’t for me.
Opera features artists who are classically trained to sing, and it is rare to hear spoken dialogue: musicals feature professionally trained singers who also have to act. A play can feature either of these, but they have to be able to act: you can’t escape a bad acting job by breaking into song.
On the other hand, musical productions these days are just so darned commercial and come off as emotion-stroking psychological mass hypnosis events. They all promote largely and loud, and with Disney helming three productions on Broadway these days, a walk through New York City, just to wind my way to the Metropolitan Opera for a dose of Puccini, seems like I’m in the middle of a municipal mega mart. The signs are huge, the lights glaring, the tickets expensive and, in the long run, it feels like being overwhelmed with sixty different brands of corn flakes.
I’m actually going to see a touring production of Les Miserables next month. It’s my first big ticket smash show in years. I’m going for the cast, rather than the production. At least I know what I’m getting into, but I won’t know until it’s over whether I’m a bigger fan of the theatre or the opera. It will be up to them, not me, what the outcome will be.
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