Thanks to the power of state-of-the-art satellite communications and high-definition video, I became a time traveler last weekend. I went to a movie theater to see the Metropolitan Opera production of La Bohème, which had been recorded a week before. So I was traveling back in time to a week ago, when they put on an opera that was written in the late 1800s, based on a book published in the mid-1800s, that was about life in the early 1800s. Clearly I am a time traveler in every sense but the interesting one.
As a humorist, I'm under a tremendous amount of pressure to hate opera. It's the easiest target on the planet. Writers who can't handle the subtle nuances of insulting Jack Thompson or airline food are happy to take on opera. Everyone speaks European! It confuses the brain stem! Large women sing in horn-hats! Nobody fights on top of a train!
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Well, yeah, OK, but I liked it. Maybe it was just the novelty of being in a movie theater where nobody was making cellphone calls about how to silence their crying child who nearly choked on a noisy candy wrapper.
Everyone was extremely quiet and old in the theater. They tucked their walkers in from the aisle, made sure their medical-alert bracelets weren't jingling, and watched the damn show. If hanging out with old people is the only way I can get some quiet in the movie theater, then buy me a ticket to Cinema Fogy. Bring on the newsreels and the water ballet!
I also enjoyed the opera itself. I have to admit, I was expecting it to be more complicated. I generally assume anything foreign and/or classical is going to be layered with deep meaning that can only be teased out of the experience afterward by drinking a macchiato while writing in a Moleskine about mise en scène.
This opera, however, followed a simple rule: Only one thing can happen per act.
Act 1: A guy and a lady fall in love.
Act 2: Another guy and another lady fall in love.
Act 3: Some people break up while others don't.
Act 4: One of the ladies dies.
That's pretty much it, and it's all laid out for you in subtitles. If you have trouble following this opera, then you're going to be baffled by the plot twists in the average Garfield strip.
On the other hand, a Garfield strip doesn't last 3½ hours. That's because Garfield doesn't spend the first panel singing a long, slow aria called "Io Mangerè Questo Lasagne."
This is where opera breaks down for geeks and their famously short attention spans. They get bored spending hours watching people sing about dying. I figure if I can enjoy grinding for Worn Dragonscales in Warcraft, I can sure as hell enjoy watching a busty Chilean soprano in a corset emote for a while. Plus, there were two intermissions where Dreyer's Dibs could be purchased for a merely outlandish price.
As a final selling point, La Bohème is about artists. These artists were young, but some of them were older than me. These artists were starving and emaciated, but some of them were fatter than me. Plus, I was one of the most athletic people in the theater itself. Compared with either the actors or the audience, I'm Orlando Bloom. Well, OK, Elijah Wood. All right, Sean Astin, but the point is I'm somewhere in that range.
All I need to do is learn to sing tenor in a voice that can make Amanda Holden ovulate at 20 paces, and I'm in there.
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Born helpless, nude and unable to provide for himself, Lore Sjöberg eventually overcame these handicaps to assert that someone really ought to write an opera about the One Ring.
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