Monday, March 24, 2008
Many Nights at the Opera Involve Emergency Room
New York Times: "When the tenor Gary Lehman slid down the raked stage into the prompter’s box on Tuesday night during Wagner’s “Tristan und Isolde” at the Metropolitan Opera, stopping the show at the start of Act III, he entered a storied history of midperformance mishaps at the opera."
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
4 comments:
Weird article. People think this show is cursed! But wait! People get hurt during other shows! *examples*
But yeah, I think a lot of the problems are that people get sick, they perform, and their heads can't completely focus on what's at hand. The actor that slipped might have been focusing so hard on singing that he just misstepped. Happens a lot. People make mistakes when they're sick.
All things considered, I'm sure the accident to rehearsal and show ratio is really, really low. It's just that these accidents are really salient and the public tends to remember them more just because someone got injured during something as silly as a play. No one would notice if a realtor twisted his ankle at the office..
This is kind of creepy. It's like the Scottish play of the opera. I've never heard all of this stuff connected to Tristan and Isolde. Weird. I've always found it facinating how bad luck just seems to follow some shows around. It just goes to show, sometimes there's something to be said for a little theatre superstition, or maybe just some antibiotics.
But I like Tristan und Isolde.... Oh well, I guess this show will not open in the Mets for another decade then... It's strange enough that people coming back from excavations sites in Cairo drops dead by minute, but people getting sick and dying away after opening a show in the middle of New York seems really odd. But I read an article once about the Bermuda triangle and their relationship to the accident. It generally said that people remember the accidents that happen around the area and seem to remember them for longer period of time. And that's how the legend of the triangle started.
It is kind of great that the times did this article. Opera really isn't a profession that most people view as dangerous, and if any aspect of Opera that i'd view as dangerous, I wouldn't think it was the singers' job. It is interesting that they didn't cover the injury of any crew members on the Met stage. Why do I have a feeling for these 10 or so actors they mentioned, 50 or so crew members were injured. Stay Safe!
Post a Comment