La Boheme

Amazing! Just amazing! Sure, Puccini's not my favorite composer (by a LONG shot) but I just loved it! We got there decently early, and we were just inside the door. The ushers tonight were being really nasty...they even locked us in! Nick was still outside waiting for his friends, who turned out to be inside anyway! And of course he couldn't get in 'cause the doors were locked....It all worked out, though, and I relayed that we had bought tickets in the upper gallery, so he just met us there. It was fairly crowded, but I don't know how it usually is up there...tonight was my first time up in the top balcony. It was kind of nice because you have a much better view of the orchestra and you can hear everything a bit better, but at the same time you have to strain your eyes a lot more, and it's weird to me to always look down. I mean, for €1.50 more I could be standing on the ground floor....also, since we were in the second row, there wasn't a rail behind us, so I couldn't do the old butt-on-the-lower-rail trick. The opera itself was good, and the singing was absolutely amazing. It was more light-hearted than I expected....I have never seen it, so I didn't really know what the plot was like at all. Correction: technically I have seen it at an outing that I went to with LACHSA, but I don't remember anything because they did it in English without subtitles and I think I fell asleep anyway....plus it was LA Opera second-tier cast, so I doubt the singing was out of this world....tonight it certainly was! Mimi certainly was, and Rodolfo! He was damn good!! I meant to get their names after the show, but when I went to the places where tehy have the casts posted they had already changed it to the cast list for tomorrow night's performance of La Favorite (which I don't think I'll see, thanks.) It was nice being able to see the orchestra, although we couldn't see the conductor. It was fun going with a huge group, although most of them were IES students that I didn't really know.