Sunday, May 20, 2007
A Night at the Opera
Last night my friend and I went to the Chicago Opera Theater, which was fairly wonderful. The first opera was Bluebeard's Castle, a charming little tale about a big, scary man with intense facial hair and lots of rooms in his house that are filled with blood. The plot of the show is essentially just a house tour (here's a tip, Bluebeard: start the tour with the room full of gems rather than the torture chamber -- it's a little homier), but the music is pretty great. And it starred Samuel Ramey, who's exceedingly famous in the opera world, which equates to about Screech famous in the regular world. The second opera was Schoenberg's Erwartung, which also featured blood, this time attached to the corpse that was one of the only two characters in the show. The corpse did not sing, but boy was it good at acting dead. I'm saying local Emmys all around, frankly.
The real fun of the evening had to be our journey down there, however, which involved an aborted train ride, multiple unsuccessful attempts at taxification, and two Canadian girls. After being unable to even get into the Addison station on the red line due to the crowds from the Cubs/Sox game, we decided to walk all the way down to the brown line at Wellington, where we waited for fifteen minutes without ever seeing a train. We then walked another ten blocks or so in search of a cab, before being forced to share by two rather aggressive ladies from Toronto, who spent most of the trip arguing with the driver. The end result was that despite leaving ourselves an hour and fifteen minutes to get there, we arrived five minutes before curtain. I didn't even have time to pee.
But luckily, both operas were short, so my urinary tract was as satisfied as my artistic sensibilities. Now that's a hott, hott weekend.
Last night my friend and I went to the Chicago Opera Theater, which was fairly wonderful. The first opera was Bluebeard's Castle, a charming little tale about a big, scary man with intense facial hair and lots of rooms in his house that are filled with blood. The plot of the show is essentially just a house tour (here's a tip, Bluebeard: start the tour with the room full of gems rather than the torture chamber -- it's a little homier), but the music is pretty great. And it starred Samuel Ramey, who's exceedingly famous in the opera world, which equates to about Screech famous in the regular world. The second opera was Schoenberg's Erwartung, which also featured blood, this time attached to the corpse that was one of the only two characters in the show. The corpse did not sing, but boy was it good at acting dead. I'm saying local Emmys all around, frankly.
The real fun of the evening had to be our journey down there, however, which involved an aborted train ride, multiple unsuccessful attempts at taxification, and two Canadian girls. After being unable to even get into the Addison station on the red line due to the crowds from the Cubs/Sox game, we decided to walk all the way down to the brown line at Wellington, where we waited for fifteen minutes without ever seeing a train. We then walked another ten blocks or so in search of a cab, before being forced to share by two rather aggressive ladies from Toronto, who spent most of the trip arguing with the driver. The end result was that despite leaving ourselves an hour and fifteen minutes to get there, we arrived five minutes before curtain. I didn't even have time to pee.
But luckily, both operas were short, so my urinary tract was as satisfied as my artistic sensibilities. Now that's a hott, hott weekend.
