Last week I attended my first opera downtown. The opera production, Cosi fan tutte, was interesting but the venue itself detracted from the experience.
Usually, the venue doesn't matter to me if I can see and hear the show. I have enjoyed a tango demonstration in a cramped library conference room, a chamber concert in the lobby of a municipal office building, my younger son's rock band performing to a packed crowd seated on the cold concrete floor of a room the size of an average kitchen, and so forth. Also, as I typically buy cheap seats to big concert productions, preferring to attend many acceptable concerts rather than a handful of optimal concerts, I am accustomed to taking venue limitations in stride. However, I wasn't prepared for the vexations produced last week by the opera house.
I knew that my cheap opera ticket would put me in the worst seating of the opera house. I had made my peace with that. But I had no idea that the seat itself would be a torment. Evidently the architect had been restricted to a relatively small footprint for the opera house and had to stack the four balconies at a precipitous incline and install special jacked-up stadium seats. The seats were high as bar stools. I hopped up and sat with my legs dangling. In place of a handy bar stool rail beneath, there was a thin brass railing bolted to the bottom of the row of seats ahead. The brass railing was nearly useless for those of us with large feet; it accommodated my big toes, nothing more. During the course of the three-hour opera, I lost my toehold several times. My foot would slip off the railing and poke the bottom of the seat in front of me, inadvertently goosing an elderly lady. This made her bitter and indignant. At length, I was forced to slide partway off my seat so that one foot made contact with the floor, and I finished watching the opera sitting at a slant.
