Metropolitan Opera Embarks on $60 Million Renovation

NYTimes.com: The Met’s technology has fallen behind European opera houses, where many of the directors bringing new productions to New York are used to computerized controls that produce precise results for increasingly spectacular shows. At the Met stagehands still twiddle dials, plug in cables, consult numbered charts and use a lot of muscle. “It’s really old-fashioned technology,” the Met’s general manager, Peter Gelb, said in an interview this week. “We work with it. We use it. But it has to be modernized. It’s safe without limitations in our use of it, but at some point it could fall apart. We’re not waiting for that day to happen.”