We Spend Another Night with Joe Green

Simon Boccanegra this time, and, in keeping with the cold January we are having, there was much coughing in the hall, one loud whisper from above and to our right during one act's overture "Do you want a cough drop?", and the man next to Dana Dee sleeping through much of the prologue and Act I, then roused by the beginning of applause after an aria to enthusiastic applause and "bravo"'s himself. We've had him before beside us, must be a season subscriber as well. Dana Dee figures he'd just come from work; I -- drawing on my own occasional snooze for a few seconds -- figure in the warm hall it's a rare opera-goer who doesn't nod off at some point in the early going.

My own confusion last night came from not reading the synopsis before the curtain rises (always, always! read the synopsis), so I didn't realize that 25 years had gone by between the Prologue and Act I, and therefore thought that Simon was still the upstart pirate allowing himself to be part of a plot against the doge -- as he was in the prologue -- rather than the doge being plotted against as he is in Act I and for the rest of the opera. And, from our seats in the nose bleed section (bad visuals, but best sound, I'm told by people who know)it's hard to tell two singers with similar bodyshape apart, so I had to spend a few minutes disgusted at my erroneous idea that Simon was kissing his unknown-to-him daughter. Incest at the Met, stranger things have happened.

Fortunately, a read of the Playbill got me straightened out at intermission and everybody stayed awake -- and coughing decreased -- for Acts 2 and 3 as the interwoven plots of Italian national identity, jealousy, double identities, and Simon's own personal history of first being a rebel against authority and then the authority, get sorted out to some excellent male singing, especially Dmitri Hvorostovsky, the baritone who sings Simon, and Ramon Vargas as Gabriele who has a showstopping (for me at least) aria in Act II. Only disappointment in the night was that James Levine, who was supposed to conduct and -- so I read -- has a special enthusiasm for this opera, was indisposed with a cold and did not conduct. This did not sit well initially with the coughing audience, which did warm to the work of Levine's substitue.