Thursday, October 30, 2008

Staying in the Loop

So, say you have opera tickets for Boris Godunov in San Francisco this coming Tuesday, and say you'd like to know what's going on with events outside the opera house. San Francisco Opera to the rescue:
San Francisco Opera will provide opera patrons live TV coverage of national and local election returns prior to the performance and during the intermission of Modest Mussorgsky’s historic Russian political opera, Boris Godunov. Eight Hi-Def video screens located throughout the War Memorial Opera House will broadcast the latest election details. For those opera attendees who don’t want to miss this extraordinary opera but want to stay current with national and local news, this is the perfect marriage of art, politics, and high-tech TV.
So keep the smartphone in your pocket, no matter how tempted you are to peek halfway through an act.

3 comments:

Patrick J. Vaz said...

Maybe I'm alone in thinking this is just a bad idea. . . .

I'm as anxious about the election as everyone else, but there's nothing anyone in the audience can do to affect the outcome besides voting earlier in the day. And even preliminary results for California (i.e., Prop 8) won't be known until the opera is well underway (or over).

Anyone that wrapped up in the returns should probably stay home and follow the coverage all evening.

Anyone wanting to avoid the blah-blah coverage and just hear the results can't escape by going to the theater -- it's like going to an airport and trying to avoid those news broadcasts they insist on playing.

If Obama wins (please, please, please!) most of the SF audience will be overjoyed and distracted from the tragic opera. If the other thing happens, that is going to be one dead yet restless crowd. Either way, no one's paying attention to the opera.

If (with all due respect to an artist I've always admired) Sam Ramey's late-career wobble wasn't physically painful for me to listen to, I might have gone on that Tuesday just to get away from the coverage and to contemplate tragic misrule and its results. Ah, well. I hope the audience that is actually there is OK with this.

Lisa Hirsch said...

Heheh, those are reasonable concerns. I suspect the audience will, in fact, be extremely attentive, exactly because the opera will be a good distraction.

Patrick J. Vaz said...

Yeah, I guess I was just in a "be where you are" mood. . .