For 15 Bucks, Skip Bucket List and Check Out the Met

If you have fifteen dollars and are not afraid of heights, you can always go see an opera at the Met.

The performance will be excellent; but if it isn’t, it hardly matters—the walls are covered in velvet, the ceilings are painted gold, and there are more strange people to watch during intermission than at a medieval Silk Road bazaar.

When I met my companion in the plaza by the fountain, she had her hair up and was wearing high heels. We proceeded to have a small argument. I suggested that Lincoln Center, for all the beauty of its airy white boxes, violates the Mahattan street grid, the city’s most basic feature and its well of Cartesian infinity; she said, "On the contrary, Lincoln Center is quintessentially ‘New York.’"

This is completely subjective, so I pulled rank as a native.

The ushers wore red capes, the stairs rose up majestically, and the ceiling—as I mentioned—was painted gold. At other concert halls there is often a feeling of staid obligation as nondescript crowds with season subscriptions file in to audit chamber music, but at the Met, everyone smiles, ready for an adventure. We climbed four flights of stairs and made our way to two plush seats in the middle of a row, from which we looked down to the stage as if into Eden from an Empyrean heaven. (Eden, I imagine, was small.)

The opera was Rossini’s Barber of Seville. Figaro, the warm-hearted barber of Moorish, romantic old Spain, carries ladders, passes notes, and otherwise schemes to further the romance of the disguised Count Almaviva with sweet Rosina, while foiling the plans of Dr. Bartolo, her guardian, to marry her himself. The light but perfect overture, unharmed by repeated use in Bugs Bunny cartoons, is exhilarating; Figaro’s introductory aria—"Figaro! Figaro! Figaro!"—has echoed through all of pop culture; Almaviva’s Spanish-style ballad "Ecco ridente," accompanied by guitar, is lovely; and there is never any doubt that the hero will get the girl. The performance—the Met’s 568th, according to the program, since they first staged it in 1883—was, unfortunately, less so.

I glanced at my companion to see what she thought. Sometimes she laughed—as when Figaro announces that he is late to give the mayor an enema—and sometimes she dozed on my shoulder, but she never expressed clearly, by means of a facial expression, what she thought of the singers or of the conductor, Frédéric Chaslin. During intermission, after we had waited on Soviet-style lines to the restrooms, we met by the balcony railing and compared notes as short men in weird suits, rich women with orange skin, ballet dancers, and giddy Juilliard students walked by.

"I like the guy playing Almaviva," I said, meaning Spanish tenor José Manuel Zapata.

"No, no, no," she said, "I thought he was terrible! Figaro was good—what did you think of him?"

This was Italian baritone Franco Vassallo.

"Eh," I said. "Really, it’s hard to say—none of them projected. But what do I know? Maybe it’s our seats."

In the end, we agreed that mezzo Elīna Garanča was lovely as Rosina; that the orchestra’s volume swayed unpredictably; that the use of a donkey, not pulling Figaro’s wheeled barbershop but led behind it, was a charming superfluity; and that the set, with its nine moving doors, was very funny. We also agreed that it is hard to be critical of a show in which the theater has starburst chandeliers that are pulled up into the ceiling—a ceiling which, as I have mentioned, is painted gold.

She dozed through the second half while Almaviva disguised himself as a music teacher; Dr. Bartolo deceived Rosina about her lover’s intentions; Rosina agreed to marry him; a notary was fetched; Almaviva revealed himself and won Rosina back; and the lovers were finally married.

Then she coughed softly, choking on a hard candy. After the curtains fell, the audience produced tepid applause: Elīna Garanča, alone, got a “bravo,” and the applause had almost died out before the last minor character came forward for a bow.

I considered finding the man who yelled "bravo" and telling him that he should have said "brava," but my companion led me out by the arm.

As we walked up to the subway, she told me that, failings of the production notwithstanding, she had enjoyed the show more than a Lord of the Rings marathon at Walter Reade Theater. (I maintained a neutral expression until she explained that that had been something she had enjoyed.)

In the subway, two aging men I have seen around New York for years, one of them tall and missing his front teeth, came through the car singing a Doo-Wop song.