Hey guys and gals! Binocular guy is here to tell you about the opera experience from a magnified point of view. First off let me start by saying that I used the binoculars sparingly at the beginning of most scenes to see the acting and the costumes. We were so high up and far away from the stage that using the binoculars strained my eyes and gave me a headache. The binoculars did however help me to see the performance, the costumes, and the actors’ facial expressions and added to the total experience of the opera. I passed them down the row during the second act because sharing is caring. I felt awkward using the binoculars while everyone was just sitting and looking in their screens and at the ant-like figures below.
As a young opera viewer who has never been to an opera before I would have to say the overall experience was unique. If I would have to describe the opera to a friend I would say it’s a large play in a huge theater the size of one quarter of a baseball stadium. The actors wear extremely fancy costumes and do not look like normal people at all. The whole performance is through song and an orchestra in front of the stage performs the music. After telling my friend this generic description of the opera I would give him or her the real scoop on the opera we went to.
The opera Don Giovanni felt like the opera that is stereotypically portrayed in television and movies. Throughout the performance I began to understand why I have never seen an opera before. First we have the never-ending singing. The actors perform the story through singing that is so incomprehensible because the opera was in Italian and the words are dragged on for so long that it sounds like a bunch of OOOLAlAlalas after a while. Even if the performance were in English we wouldn’t be able to understand it. This forces the audience to ignore the speech and words the characters are saying and instead try to understand the story through the body language of the actor. Since no comprehensible words are registered in the audience’s brains it becomes very difficult to follow the story if you do not read the subtitles in front of you. This leads to a weak plot that is highly predictable.
And for the most part I found Don Giovanni’s plot to be very weak. From the very beginning when he is trying to have his way with Donna Anna it is so obvious that he is going to be the antihero of a tragedy. Don Giovanni runs around and pisses everyone off only to be stopped by the supernatural. The simplicity of the plot may have been on purpose for the opera because maybe we wouldn’t be able to understand it at all otherwise. I’m thinking of complex movie plots like The Matrix or Inception and imagining them in Italian opera form. It would be impossible to understand anything because a few subtitles here and there wouldn’t be able to immerse the audience in a massively different alternate world. I thought the plot of Don Giovanni was very simple and even though it was an opera does the plot have to be any weaker than that of entertainment in other media?
Even though I thought the plot was weak I thought the actors’ performances in singing and acting were superb. While watching Don Giovanni I felt that these actors might be the most professional actors we have seen in terms of talent and difficulty of their performance. With the naked eye I could only make out the action and movement of the performers. This was very important for me in order to feel engaged as an audience member. I was thinking that the actors wouldn’t be as pressured to act with full facial expressions as though we were viewing them up close in a televised way, but that is exactly what they did. Looking through the binoculars I saw this other view where I could actually see the acting and I did not have to imagine what they must look like down there. I enjoyed the acting of the actors who portrayed Donna Elvira and Leoporello the most because up close I could really see the amount of hard work and talent as they performed these roles. It was as if they performed their parts in a mirror and had exacted the way in which they should perform even though most audience members could barely see their faces.
The costumes, stage direction, and music of the production were on a much grander scale than what I have been exposed to before. The costumes were believable for over exaggerated fancy opera costumes like the many costumes of Don Giovanni. The costumes of the women were very fancy except for Zerlina’s which looked simple and it helped to differentiate economic status of the characters. Leoporello’s costume was shaggy and loose fitting and I thought it fit his character. With the stage direction of the performance I liked how the stage would alternate between outside and inside with the large brick façade that would be pushed together for outside and pulled apart for more open scene. The best part of the entire opera experience though had to be the orchestrated music. For the entire length of the opera they were performing and its easy to take their performance for granted. The music itself set the mood for the entire opera and without it there wouldn’t be an opera.
For the opera adding to the concept of New York fantasy/nightmare situation I think it really has to do with economic class. The seats of the opera are so expensive that the cheap seats that normal people like us would pay for are twenty-five dollars. The only people dreaming about coming to New York to see an opera are people who can afford a vacation to New York and then have enough money to be willing to pay for better seats in the theater. In Woody Allen’s movie “Manhattan” the characters in the movie are able to afford the luxuries of appreciating art in many different forms which could include opera performance. In contrast we saw the movie “In America” where the father dreamed of being the performer and making it big as an actor in New York. For me these two movies illustrate a large difference between people who observe art and the actual artists. The first group are like art consumers and they spend their extra money and time on these performances because they enjoy them. The artists on the other hand appreciate art but must also produce art in order to make a living for themselves. If one does not fall into one of these two groups then New York as a city of dreams with respect to the opera would not be very relevant.
