Early to bed
La Cieca is told that at least three productions at the Met this year will be shorn of an accustomed intermission: Simon Boccanegra, The Queen of Spades and La traviata will all be done in “two-act” versions, each with but a single interval.
yes they are but you are in a festival and the performances all start at 4 except for Rheingold and Hollaender which start at 6. Wagner acts are all about an hour with some like Goetterdaemmerung and Meistersinger even longer. You still get out at a decent time to have dinner afterwards or some eat something like a snack between the acts until the end of the opera when you have dinner. No one there has to get up the next day to get to work.
You can comfortably have dinner during the intermissions, either at the Festspielhaus restaurant – expensive – or up the road at the Bürgerreuth which is 5 mins walk from the theatre. Best to pre-order, but it works like clockwork – starter and main in first interval, dessert in second!
I’m a big fan of intermissions. In addition to the requisite glass of champagne, the breaks are good for rumination. But at SFO, many weeknight performances begin at 7:30, and our intermissions usually run to 20 min.
Intermissions are a necessary evil, regardless of the needs of the audience. It’s rare that the entire 30 min is not a flurry of backstage activity to set new scenery and electrics, change costumes, etc. which is why that time is continuous as far as all the union timeclocks go. (It goes unspoken that it’s also when Miss ________ can phone her paramour or update her Facebook status…) But, if the evening has a second intermission that is NOT required for the scene/costume changes to be made, the final curtain still comes down 30 min later… and a half hour of overtime for 250 or more employees (musicians, choristers, carpenters, etc) which won’t be paid for by the add’l glasses of wine sold in the bar. In the big picture, I think it’s a reasonable cost-cutting measure.
True, I surmise this is mostly to trim labor and overtime costs. Makes sense to me. Of course, sometimes it can’t be helped–we just played “Tristan” here in Seattle, and the entire third act was overtime for the orchestra. Nice paycheck.
The problem, and I don’t think it can be solved easily, is that the rest rooms, the women’s in particular, are too small for the size of the house. It’s particularly bad up in the Family Circle. Where massive lines for both last for more that 20 minutes sometimes. I really don’t think the structure of the public areas could be reconfigured to increase the size of the current rest rooms or to add new ones.
I always use the women’s restroom way up in Family Circle. No line longer then 5 minutes. I don’t think people know about it it’s never crowded.
For Boccanegra, it’s a Godsend. When I saw it last season, there was an intermission after the first scene–about 20 minutes of music followed by 30 minutes away. NO continuity was possible.
You could argue that continuity isn’t necessary after the first scene of Boccanegra – after all 25 years have passed when you get back to your seat.
On the subject of opera time, has anyone ever seen Donizetti’s Otto mesi in sei giorni?
There NEEDS to be an intermission after the prologue.
At the risk of repeating myself, all of these comments address the interval as a necessary evil—we wouldn’t need them at all if we could do without set changes and urination.
I beg to differ. An evening of opera without intermissions punctuating the music (in the way the operas were originally conceived, usually) is like a dinner with all the courses rushed out one after another. It’s about pacing. And yes, even the Met’s long intermissions, whether needed for the stage crew or the incontinent family circlers, are a delight for the audience, who get to spend a lovely half hour in one of New York’s most exciting buildings (even if the lobby is too small), looking at some of New York’s (and the world’s) most interesting (in one way or another) people, and enjoying dry champagne (or dry brownies, but still).
Which raises a question—when listening to (or watching) an opera recording at home (if you listen to the whole thing at once anyway), do you really run through it without stopping, or do you (as I do) take a definite break between acts? I find most operas—and most music of any weight—simply exhausting at several uninterrupted hours.
I always try to take all the breaks between acts, specially with operas like Tristan. Boccanegra will be well with one intermission, but Traviata will lose completelly its pacing. And the Pikovaya Dama has a really good structure, hear that opera with only one intermission, as it happened two seasons ago, spoil the complete performance.
I’m lucky to get through an entire recording throughout a day, if I’m at home – there are so many more distractions!
Dry champagne IS the best part of the intermission.
“Dry champagne IS the best part of the intermission”…..it i usually well overpriced shit.I keep tabulating how much the fools are paying for it and how cheap a full bottle of the same stuff would be if one brought it elsewhere!
Part of that interval game is knowing how to do it with precious haughty affectation. To clutch the glass to one’s bosom with inverted hand…as if one is fiddling with one’s imaginary pearls. As its practitioners trizz like catwalk mannequins.
The frigging pretense of it all pisses me off.
You think the champagne is supposed to be high-quality and/or reasonably priced? You’ve completely missed the point!
Reverse snobbery is the worst kind.
I usually do take a little break between acts when listening to opera CDs, although the breaks are usually on the order of only 5 min. It’s true that sometimes I listen to them straight through, without breaks, esp. if at work or while driving. I’ve realized that I don’t like listening to sections out of order or context, so recital discs don’t work that well for me. A shame because I needed to buy a few of them before I made this discovery.
Simply exhausting? I have been known to have started the night with the complete Rheingold and Walkure and called it a night in the middle of Siegfried. Learn to be a marathon listener. Intervals irk me. Just so much poncing around by so many ‘trying to be noticed’.
If you can get through Act I of Walküre without being exhausted, you aren’t really paying attention.
Well, whatever, just don’t forget your hip-flask…
#1. You absolutely need the full 30 minutes to enable everyone to use the inadequate bathrooms. The lines are ridiculous.
#2. If they eliminate an intermission, does that save the Met any money on labor costs? I could see that being a major reason. If so, anyone have an informed opinion as to how much?
Doesn’t the Met have to pay overtime? In London, costs go soaring if the performance – including intervals – exceeds 3 hours.
Performances here in Rome start during the week at 2030. You grab a quick aperitivo (or if its going to be a long first act an espresso) and sandwich and settle in for the duration knowing that the posted times for intermission (much like the cast lists) could qualify for the Booker Prize. A 20 minutes intermission stretches to 30 minutes (45 on opening nights as the kissy-kissy-dahling-love-your-new-facelift factor is higher)and the posted performance end time is normally off by about 35 minutes. So you haul your butt out of the theatre at 0030, pay the hiked up cab fare and head home to a bowl of cold pasta left over from the previous night’s dinner and a few swigs of that amusing little Frescati that you had recapped two night ago. It all part of the experience.
And as a side note – on opening night of the Zia Zeff Falstaff we had 10 minute waits between scene changes plus the long intermissions. Verdi’s shortest opera (I believe) reached Wagnerian proportions and most of the time wasn’t taken up with music.
Zia Zeff! Haha!
In his first paragraph willym describes an ideal evening.
I don’t know where this “just do the show and let me get outta here” attitude comes from. These are presumably the same folks who run for the exits during curtain calls.
Wonderfully put!
Really, if you can’t spare another five minutes to let the performers know how you feel, then why did you bother at all? Running to get into another line out of the parking lot.
One of the best way to enjoy the intermissions at the MET is to stretch out on the sofas in the corridors during the first act. That way you’re right there when people start pouring in. It also give you the opportunity to get to know the front of house staff and even grab a smoke on the balcony while all those people are singing onstage.
I only sanction this in Siegfried (especially if you can sneak in for the Forging Song).