Tiger King or Met Opera?

Since y'all not going to pretend that y'all aren't spending your quarantined days watching Tiger King, the seven-part Netflix series with a menagerie of characters so wacky and out there you can scarcely believe they really exist, this week's survey of the Met livestream offerings with just make comparisons to how watchable they are versus Tiger King.

So without further ado, here's the run-down of this week's Met streaming schedule (can you tell that I'm writing this between re-watching episodes of Tiger King?)

COVIDammerung -- The End of the World in Met Streams

The Norns say it's the end of the world!

The nightly Met streams continue this week. Someone behind the dial at the Met must have a dark sense of humor -- for the first week of streaming they included La Boheme and La Traviata, two operas where the heroine dies of a specific infectious respiratory illness that was often acquired by lack of social distancing. This week they are doing an all-Wagner week which happens to include ... wait for it ... Götteradamerung.

So try to forget the fact that the Met season has been canceled! Try to forget that everyone in NY and NJ is essentially locked in our houses! At the Met website we can watch the End of the World! Without further ado, here are some of my totally irrelevant musings on the Met HD offerings this week. Either way, these Wagner operas are great cleaning routines. You can disinfect your residence three times over BEFORE the first intermission:

For the CoVid Apocalypse

On March 12, 2020 basically everything in NYC shut down. In one fell swoop The Metropolitan Opera, Carnegie Hall, The New York Philharmonic shuttered its doors for the remainder of March. Broadway is closed until at least April 12.

I felt very lucky that I literally caught the last show in town -- on March 11 I saw a wonderful off-Broadway revival of Little Shop of Horrors. Gideon Glick (Seymour) was so endearingly shy as Seymour and Christian Borle (Odin/other roles) was hilarious as the sadistic dentist. I haven't seen a production of Little Shop of Horrors since our high school did it and Audrey II sent shock waves through the auditorium when he said "No shit, Sherlock." (My high school was a very conservative place.) I also caught a preview performance of Martin McDonagh's The Hangmen which now might never open. Again, a play definitely worth seeing if it ever opens. Has a lot of dark humor and a very ambiguous ending. The cast which included Mark Addy, Dan Stevens, and Tracie Bennett was terrific.

In the wake of this CoVid Apocalyse, the Metropolitan Opera and Vienna State Opera will stream some past HD's on their websites. Social distancing made a little more bearable.

Here is this week's schedule. I saw all these HD's and have revisited these performances either on Met Opera on Demand or DVD and here's my totally irrelevant opinions on whether these HD's are a must-see or whether you can fire up the Netflix binges instead. Stay safe everyone, and wash your hands!

Met's New Dutchman Drowns

Dutchman set, photo @ Ken Howard

New Wagner productions around the opera world are considered Events. Expectations are usually high. The thinking is that it's hard to mount Wagner without a worthy cast, so therefore performances tend to be worthy. Francois Girard's new production of The Flying Dutchman was highly anticipated. It got the NYTimes promo treatment. Sure the original Dutchman Bryn Terfel had to withdraw because of a broken ankle but still, this should have been good.

Agrippina: In Which I Brave Baroque Opera Seria

Evil, evil people. Photo @ Marty Sohl

Some people are afraid of snakes. Other people are afraid of heights. Me? I have another phobia: baroque opera seria. Nothing strikes more fear into my heart than hours of da capo arias. Listening to those ornate A-B-A melodies is more intimidating than twelve-tone music, more intimidating than John Cage's "random sounds," more intimidating than a root canal. But life is all about conquering fears, and today I sat through Handel's Agrippina. I was buoyed by good reviews and also the availability of cheap rush tickets on HD day.

La Traviata's Second Cast is First Best

Oropesa and the rest of the Traviata cast, photo @ Richard Termine

In a Met season there always is an unspoken pecking order regarding revivals. Some revivals are heavily promoted with lots of press, sometimes a New York Times or Opera News profile and an HD transmission. Others are quietly tucked into a season and come and go with no fanfare.

The second cast of the Met's revival of La Traviata seems to have fallen to the bottom of the totem pole -- it didn't even merit a promotional video on the Met's Youtube channel. Too bad, because it's the strongest revival of the year. It surpassed the first cast (starring Aleksandra Kurzak, Dmytro Popov and Quinn Kelsey) in every way. From curtain to curtain it was just a very well-sung, moving performance. Even Michael Mayer's shallow, gaudy production looked better with performers as sincere as Lisette Oropesa, Piero Pretti, and Luca Salsi. (Germont's silent daughter popping up in inopportune moments is a directorial conceit that unfortunately has not been 86'ed.)

West Side Story: Total Momsical Failure

Tony and Maria pulled apart, photo @ Sara Krulwich

Every year I try to take my mom to one Broadway musical. My mom requires two things: 1) it be a classic musical; and 2) it's not R-rated. So this year I bought tickets to Ivo van Hove's highly discussed revival of West Side Story. When it was over my mom beat a hasty retreat out of the theater. I asked her what she thought. "I wanted to see West Side Story, not a home video of West Side Story!"

NYCB's Episodes Wakes Up Sleepy Winter Season

Paul Taylor in Episodes

NYCB's Winter Season is usually a big gathering of dance fans who crave 'real dance' after Nutcracker season. Yet after three weeks of Winter Season it's hard to ignore the empty auditorium, the tepid crowds, and the feeling that for whatever reason the company is in a rut.

It's a strange feeling because the programming has been strong. The dancing has rarely been outright bad. And there have been excellent performances: Tiler Peck (paired with the virtuoso Roman Mejia) losing a bit of her speed but none of her brilliance in Allegro Brillante, Joseph Gordon soaring in the variations of La Source and remembering to point his feet, the delightful Emma von Enck charming the audience as the solo girl in La Source. Teresa Reichlen and Ask La Cour have been having the seasons of their lives -- they were gorgeous sculptures in Momentum and all twisted angularity in Movements, and both of them danced a Firebird that was beautiful, mysterious, and surprisingly heartrending.

Ratmansky's New-Old Giselle

Olga Smirnova and Artemy Belyakov

On Sunday, January 26 the Bolshoi Ballet had a cinemacast that was an Event for balletomanes -- it was the live transmission of Alexei Ratmansky's reconstruction of Giselle. Ratmansky has reconstructed Sleeping Beauty and Harlequinade for ABT and Swan Lake for Zurich Ballet. In each of those reconstructions he not only restored altered steps but he insisted on restoring a facsimile of 19th-century Imperial Ballet style. Low extensions, modest jumps, more expressive mime. For Giselle Ratmansky has as usual relied on the Stepanov notations for Petipa's productions for the Imperial Ballet, as well as choreographic sources from Henri Justament who documented a production of Giselle in 1860.

Even a Booer Can't Wake Up Bland, Efficient Met Traviata

La Traviata, photo @ Marty Sohl

A champagne flute was thrown across the stage. The soprano twirled defiantly. She glowered and smirked at the audience. Then she launched into "Sempre libera" and capped the aria with an interpolated E-flat. Curtain comes down. Audience is mildly appreciative, except for one guy, who booed loudly from the E-flat to the part where audience members make that mad dash to the restroom.

I was puzzled because there was nothing to boo about. In fact I couldn't imagine generating strong feelings either way about the Met's revival of La Traviata. The evening was from curtain to curtain blandly efficient. No one was really terrible, but there just wasn't anything interesting happening.