I enjoyed opening night at Seattle Opera’s Beatrice and Benedict (Berlioz). The production is in English, with supertitles for when they are actually singing, and the acting is superb. The young attractive people who are considering marriage are actually young and attractive. The set is huge and impressive.
The libretto remains mostly relevant to our time. Benedict worries about entering into a marriage that will devolve into “frigidity” (a 52% probability today, according to Good Housekeeping) and/or “wearing horns” (roughly a 20% risk today, according to “Women Are Now Cheating As Much As Men, But With Fewer Consequences” (NY Mag)). Beatrice worries about losing her freedom (this was written before the advent of unilateral on-demand divorce).
Given the the core opera-going demographic is now “ancient, Russian, or gay” I feel that it is important to report on seat comfort. The box seats appeared to be in fixed positions, just like those in the orchestra. It is possible to put one’s feet underneath the seat in front and therefore there is a lot more legroom than in some halls. Sadly they don’t offer the power recliners that have become standard in movie theaters! A reader who is a subscriber says that one should ideally be within the first 20 rows due to a lack of amplification (though for this production the singers were wearing microphones).
Is it possible that a man and a woman both hostile to the idea of marriage will end up married? get tickets and find out!
[Separately, I toured a couple of aviation museums at Paine Field the day after the opera. One member of our group was a young engineer at Boeing. He said “Except for me and a couple of other young people, everyone in our group is an older guy. They’ve all been divorced by their wives.” (see Washington family law for the details)]
Related:
I thought that it’s not real opera if there’s amplification?
Couple tidbits:
1) Turns out, Berlioz dropped original Shakespeare’s dramatic line from Beatrice and Benedict and made it comedy with librettos in both in German and French. Seattle opera translated it “back” to English and added “more dramatic” Claudio/Hero line back. They used other Berlioz’es pieces for music for additions.
2) (As turns out they explained before the opera, which I missed) As such, they added a lot of spoken text, and used amplification for spoken parts. Amplification was not used for singing.
Overall, it turned out great, I enjoyed it.