A Night at the Opera
A little culture goes a very, very, very, very long way
My wife bought some discount opera tickets recently—they had been marked down from sky-high to exorbitant. Basically, they cost a leg. Still, I was excited. You see, the whole point of going to the opera is to tell people you went to the opera.
ME: Hey, what did you do last night?
DOPEY GUY: I ate a sleeve of Ritz crackers and watched the bad season of Bridgerton. You?
ME: I went to the opera.
DOPEY GUY: Wow, you are indeed my intellectual superior!
The show was Rodelinda by George Frideric Handel, and it was playing at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York City. This is a truly impressive place where the stage is 54 feet tall. Fifty-four feet! Why? In case Godzilla wanted to sing Carmen?
I opened my programme, which began: “One of Handel’s most successful operas in its day and one of his most highly regarded in recent times …”
Liars! No one has ever heard of Rodelinda. It’s in the Opera Witness Protection Programme. To me, Rodelinda sounded like that cholesterol medicine I keep forgetting to take.
Then followed a lengthy synopsis of the plot. It was their way of admitting, “You’ll never understand what you’re about to see.” I was handed a synopsis before David Lynch’s Dune, as well as for every Tom Stoppard play ever written. It’s bad news when you’re given homework at the start of a show.
Just as the lights went down, I saw the most alarming words in the programme: “Tonight’s show will begin at 7:30 and end at 11:30.”
Four hours! An hour longer than Mozart’s longest opera? There’s nothing I wan...
My wife bought some discount opera tickets recently—they had been marked down from sky-high to exorbitant. Basically, they cost a leg. Still, I was excited. You see, the whole point of going to the opera is to tell people you went to the opera.
ME: Hey, what did you do last night?
DOPEY GUY: I ate a sleeve of Ritz crackers and watched the bad season of Bridgerton. You?
ME: I went to the opera.
DOPEY GUY: Wow, you are indeed my intellectual superior!
The show was Rodelinda by George Frideric Handel, and it was playing at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York City. This is a truly impressive place where the stage is 54 feet tall. Fifty-four feet! Why? In case Godzilla wanted to sing Carmen?
I opened my programme, which began: “One of Handel’s most successful operas in its day and one of his most highly regarded in recent times …”
Liars! No one has ever heard of Rodelinda. It’s in the Opera Witness Protection Programme. To me, Rodelinda sounded like that cholesterol medicine I keep forgetting to take.
Then followed a lengthy synopsis of the plot. It was their way of admitting, “You’ll never understand what you’re about to see.” I was handed a synopsis before David Lynch’s Dune, as well as for every Tom Stoppard play ever written. It’s bad news when you’re given homework at the start of a show.
Just as the lights went down, I saw the most alarming words in the programme: “Tonight’s show will begin at 7:30 and end at 11:30.”
Four hours! An hour longer than Mozart’s longest opera? There’s nothing I want to do for four hours! I love egg salad sandwiches, but I can’t enjoy one for four solid hours.
Rodelinda was written by a German composer living in England, and it was now being performed for an American audience. So, naturally, it was sung in Italian.
The opera house kindly provided subtitles. They were on a tiny digital monitor mounted two inches above the back of the seat in front of me. You had a choice: Watch the show or look down at the subtitles. You couldn’t do both. What’s more, the words were printed in a microscopic font about the size of the side effects on that cholesterol medicine I keep forgetting to take.
You know you’re in for fun from Rodelinda’s opening aria: “Misfortune haunts me. My unhappiness grows ever greater. Ever greater. My unhappiness grows ever greater.”
One reason for her unhappiness was that the role of her husband, Bertarido, was written for a castrato. In Handel’s time, some guy actually cut off his walnuts to get in this show. And now, I was willing to do the same to get out.
I enjoyed the first hour but had no appetite for three more. So at intermission, I headed for the exit. A guard stopped me.
GUARD: Are you leaving for the break or forever?
ME: Forever.
GUARD: This happens a lot.
My wife, of course, stayed for the entire show. She loves all theatre and also has a fear of missing out on anything. Recently, we were walking to an off-Broadway show and she got hit by a cab. I’m not making this up.
As she lay there, sprawled on the ground, her first words were, “I think we can still make the show.”
Note to our insurance company: We did not make the show.
Rodelinda finally ended—my wife got home well past midnight. So technically the opera had stretched out over two days. I asked my wife what I missed. She replied, “In Act Two, a horse came onstage. In Act Three, during the duke’s big number, his wig fell off.”
And what did I do during those three hours? I went out for pizza. Then I watched the movie Hellbound: Hellraiser II. (It was surprisingly good.) Then I got some falafel. And then I wrote this article. Finally, I went out for doughnuts.
Maybe that’s why I need the cholesterol medicine.
From REISSM.SUBSTACK.COM (November 2025) © 2025 Mike Reiss.