Performances

Autumn sends us back to theaters and we've been to three performances in October. Bianca plays the Brazilian maid Matilde in the Sarah Ruehl play The Clean House, at Lincoln Center a couple years ago and now, in her production, in Richmond to enthusiastic reviews and audiences. I don't worry anymore about her onstage. I sit back, like the rest of the audience, expecting to be entertained, even transported, and when that happens -- as it always does -- I get this charge of pride and amazement, "that's my kid," the one I first saw with all that dark hair on her little head years ago in Pretoria.

Two operas as well, Don Giovanni and Madama Butterfly, wonderful productions both at the Met. I put Giovanni in the top level of my favorites, along with Otello, Macbeth, Barber, Iphigenie en Tauride. Giovanni, an unrepentant piece of work as a man, shares with Macbeth the willingness to accept the consequences of his despciable actions. Amazing to the opera neophyte I remain is that Don Giovanni has no fewer than seven very major singing roles. The Uruguayan Ervin Schrott as the Don and Susan Graham as Dona Elvira were first rate -- particularly Schroot whose lust was in his acting as well as his singing --, but I thought the singers who did Ottavio and Donna Anna were even more powerful. Also, like Verdi in Otello, Mozart wasted no time in introductory niceties, throwing the audience headfirst into the music and the action with an attempted rape and a murder in the first ten minutes of the opera. Butterfly is obviously (even to me) a vehicle for the soprano singing the title role and, by that standard, this lavishly designed production by the late director Anthony Minghella excelled thanks to Patricia Racette. But I learned while watching it that while I can appreciate star vehicle operas (Norma is another) I prefer the Giovanni types, those with more ongoing engagement and dramatic conflict between and among characters. Think, besides Giovanni, Otello with major singing roles for Otello, Desdemona, Iago and Cassio.

Anyway, it's great to be in another season at the Met. Next up is Faust. Butterfly has been performed more than 800 times at the Met. A nice feature of the Playbill you get at each performance is that it states the exact number of the performance you are seeing and gives an overview of the opera's presentations at the Met.