As Lucia sang, "I am freezing and burning" in the opera by Donizetti, I felt exactly the same way as I sat watching the opera in Times Square tonight. Not dressed for the night breeze, but captivated by the hauntingly rich and dramatic story, I had to stay and watch until the tragedy unfolded fully. It was opening night at the Metropolitan Opera, and they were showing the performance live on 2 gigantic screens in Times Square, where you could sit and watch the entire opera for free. The biggest tragedy was that not every seat was full! Still, it was fun to watch the casual passer-by or tourist stumble upon the scene and, in the midst of the glitz and glamour of flashing lights and moving pictures that is Times Square, suddenly become entranced by the sound of a song written in the 1830's, and feel compelled to stop and watch, for a moment at least, to see what would happen on the dark mysterious stage.
Times Square, the temple of commercialism and advertisements run amok, has never held any appeal for me, but I loved the incongruity of it tonight. The contrast between the old and the new, the old-fashioned meeting the cutting edge, the old-fashioned commanding attention and becoming the cutting edge.
Natalie Dessay was a magnificent Lucia, but my heart went out to her poor lover Edgardo, who loved her until the end, even though he thought she had betrayed him. In reality, she had been forced to marry another man, but killed him on their wedding night in a culmination of insanity, before dying herself. At the very end, as he waits in the cemetery to duel her brother, Edgardo sees Lucia's ghost and kills himself so that he can be with her.
I didn't look as gorgeous as Cher does when, at the opera in Moonstruck, a lone glamorous tear falls down her cheek, but there I was, crying in the middle of Times Square, freezing in the night breeze blowing down Broadway, but burning with the emotion and power that such a masterpiece creates. I wasn't the only one crying.
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