As with just about anything you might do in New York, a night out starts with a subway ride, in this case from Seventh Avenue and 34th Street (not far from where I work) to Lincoln Center.
I had to go to the stage door to pick up my ticket, which is always a treat because you can see all the people bustling around backstage, getting ready for the show. I also (briefly) fantasized about riding my bike to work and locking it up on a bike rack. (In fact, I don’t think I have the patience to ride my bike to work: inevitably I would end up getting into a fight with a car driver and/or probably getting killed.) Ticket in hand, I went to my seat, pausing here and there to admire the contrast between the structural form of the theater and the more jagged/rectangular chandeliers and sconces.
Elisir falls pretty squarely into the rom-com genre as it was understood 170 years ago. There’s a peasant guy who in the attempt to make a woman return his love spends his last cent buying a “love potion” (it’s really just a bottle of wine) from a quack medicine man. The woman does not fall in love with the peasant but instead decides to accept a marriage proposal from a pompous soldier passing through town. With the wedding scheduled, will the first guy somehow win over his love? I mean, we know he will, but it’s a lot of fun (and great bel canto singing) to get there. There’s a lot of physical comedy in the show, and we the audience were LOLing hard at all the jokes, while paying rapt attention during the more emotive arias. During the intermission I went downstairs to look at the photo galleries of past singers.
As I stood pretty much enraptured by the photographs (and considered my relative ambivalence for contemporary Hollywood), I tried to figure out if I was just succumbing to bogus nostalgia or if there was something more to it. I decided there was something more to it, of course, specifically because 1) you have a great array of bodies and faces here, which is always more interesting to consider than a parade of surgery-enhanced anorexics, and 2) opera is not a youth or “tween”-oriented culture, meaning you feel like these singers are men and women who have seriously lived, and as a result are capable of expressing an adult kind of pain and joy. (On the other hand, I could just be getting old.) The chimes rang, and I went upstairs for the second act, from which everyone — on stage and off — emerged happy and in love, or at least momentarily happy and in love because as adults we understand that life is fleeting and we should proceed accordingly.
