Word: stageful
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Firm Ship. This alone, however, does not necessarily signify a blossoming of new works for the operatic stage, the few Barbers and Brittens notwithstanding. Few composers today find much encouragement to write opera. Some feel that the Met is not providing the impetus that it should in this direction, but that is one subject on which Bing cannot be moved. The Met's job, he says, is like that of a museum, "to put old masterpieces in new frames." He is convinced that opera can survive on its classical foundation without a strong infusion of contemporary music and subject...
...sound, punctuated with enough jutting exclamations of dissonance to label it contemporary, and Conductor Thomas Schippers gave it all the fierce sweep of a Force Three hurricane. Yet it was only in the latter part of the second act and in the third that the music itself overwhelmed the stage dazzles. There alone did Barber's vocal writing transform itself into genuine opera. And so what the Met had to offer on its first night in its new quarters was a musical extravaganza-which is precisely what Rudolf Bing had had in mind as a bauble...
Behind that myth is a backstage world that matches the dream in technological terms. It is a world within worlds, a vast labyrinth of shops-carpentry, electrical, wig, prop, tailor, paint-two ballet studios, 20 rehearsal rooms (three of them as large as the main stage), 14 dressing rooms for principal singers, and hangar-sized chambers capable of storing the sets for all 23 of the Met's productions this season. For the singers, accustomed to the Stygian confines of the old Met, it was like being turned loose in Wyoming; so many of them got lost...
...stage area alone is six times as large as the one in the old Met. The main stage, 100 ft. wide, 80 ft. deep, is bordered on the sides and rear by motorized stage wagons. In a dazzling display of sleight-of-hand, the main stage can drop 28 ft. into the subterranean storage chambers and emerge with a teahouse, garden, bridge and cherry orchard all ready for Madame Butterfly's entrance. Meanwhile, the three wagons can be loaded with upcoming scenes and wait to glide into the center-stage slot at the push of a.button. For other effects...
...pyramid of mail, meanwhile giving orders over his intercom system and fielding rapid-fire phone calls: "Hello. Yes. No. Tomorrow. Fine. Goodbye." Then, dictating memos over his shoulder, he would go off on his rounds, turning up onstage to admonish a stagehand ("Don't smoke on our stage, please"), switching off the lights in sub-basement storage rooms, climbing into the uppermost rafters to check on a special staging effect...