My First Opera

Dena has wanted to go to an opera for a long time now and being the fantastic partner I am I surprised her with tickets to the opera. Unfortunately, it was right during a very, very busy weekend around our house and during quite a heat wave in Los Angeles. It's hard to get all dressed up when your house is over 90 degrees.

I was dreading the opera. In my limited knowledge of it I assumed it was a musical, except in a language I didn't understand and that I'd have to read. What's worse than a subtitled musical? That is a good question but I was sure I'd be bored to tears. With that in mind I read through all the synopses and found that Tosca sounded the most interesting. It had murder and intrique with a firing squad thrown in for a bonus so I hopefully thought this would keep me entertained despite all the singing. I was right.

Basically a brief synopsis is that a guy escapes from jail, the evil police chief tries to capture him and in the meantime discovers that his latest romantic interest (Tosca), her boyfriend has harbored the escapee. He uses this information to get to her. They all die in the end. hehe We had the bonus of experiencing Plácido Domingo ( the world famous tenor and conductor), conduct the orchestra during the performance.

I learned that Opera is not quite as bad as a musical, there's the drama (over the top drama) of a theatrical performance, listening to Italian is not that bad as it's a nice language and I only fell asleep in Act 3. So all in all, I did pretty good. I did however have to promise Dena that we could go to one opera a season at the LA Opera House. Ah, the things we do for love.