Proving The Great Unwashed Right

I just finished watching the tape of the 8 November Il Barbière Met-Letterman Show (taped because I had other things to do at airtime), and if it was the Met's intention to convince those who never attend opera because they know it's stuffy, old-fashioned fare involving a bunch of screeching singers who just stand there dressed up in antique costumes making exaggerated gestures to no purpose while singing everything, none of it meaningful or of any importance, instead of speaking it like normal human beings, all to music that was passé a century ago, that they were right all along, then it succeeded brilliantly. Whomever was responsible at the Met for putting together this sorry mess ought to be hung by his you-know-whats, and left to twist in the wind (I assume the responsible party was male; if female, modify, mutatis mutandis).

First off, the Met was allotted little more air time than is allotted pop and rock acts, which is absurd from the get-go. I mean, if nothing else, this was a first, both for the Met and for the Letterman show. The Met should have insisted gently on enough air time to do the job right, failing which, it should have taken a pass.

Next, the Met should have chosen an episode from its Il Barbière where the singers are actually, you know, acting while singing: say, a cleverly edited version of parts of the opening two scenes of Act I which would have showcased the three principals — Almaviva, Figaro, and Rosina — doing their thing. That would have taken some 20 minutes of air time to perform, every minute of it dramatically coherent and riveting. The clownish cooking segment booked by Letterman to precede the Met segment should have been bumped to permit it.

And how about a lead-in set-up for what's going to be going on in that cleverly edited version of those two scenes, just like Letterman did when introducing the film clip brought by his movie-star guest, Dustin Hoffman, who was there flogging his latest flick.

Needless to say, there was none of any of that that night. What there was was a rushed 5-6 minutes or so of an antique-costumed-stand-and-deliver-cum-Italian-opera-cartoon-gestures finale of Act I sans any introduction whatsoever, all of it thoroughly incomprehensible on all counts to anyone who wasn't already familiar with the opera, and sloppily sung into the bargain.

Yes indeed. The Met did a brilliant job of convincing all those opera-haters out there that they were right all along about what opera really is.