Those lucky few of you who manage to scare up tickets to the Met’s second Ring cycle of the spring ($3,500 top) will no doubt want to start crossing your fingers now that nothing goes wrong with “The Machine” at the “prologue-evening” Das Rheingold April 26. Why, you ask? Well, should anything happen to muck up the notoriously cranky technology (which the gods forbid!), you’re pretty much fucked, because both the director of the production and the general manager of the company will be unavoidably detained.

Where? Why, in Cambridge, MA, to be exact, where on that very date Robert Lepage will be kicking back and enjoying his residency as part of his 2012 Eugene McDermott Award in the Arts at MIT, “during a public ceremony that will include a discussion of his work with Peter Gelb, general manager of the Metropolitan Opera.”

But don’t the prospect of stalled scene changes bother you: better surely to adopt the insouciant attitude espoused by the creator of the multi-million dollar production:

“In the opera world, there are different kinds of wild animals that come after you,” jokes the French-Canadian director during a rehearsal break at the Met. “But I don’t take it all as seriously as some directors do, so I don’t feel the pressure.”

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