"Manon Lescaut"

I've signed up for Firefox Performancing. I'm experimenting.

Last night we went to the opera, a dress rehearsal of Manon Lescaut, a Puccini opera about a silly, vain woman and the silly lechers who fall in love with her. Puccini wrote such great music and told such mindless stories. I guess all the operatic composers did. Someone else wrote an opera called Manon, based on the same insipid story.

Anyway, in the final act, the shamed French coquette and her foolish, gambling beloved are cast away on the shores near New Orleans, a "dry and arid land," Mr. P writes. On the stage: Rocks. A cross between Maine and volcanic Hawaii. There were a few hoots coming from this audience. We're probably just ignorant of some tradition in European opera to get every belt buckle of an 18th-century madrigal performer perfect in Acts I-III, while leaving the geography and culture of the New World -- and Louisiana no less -- to assumptions about it being "dry and arid." All I can say is y'all can get your own shrimp Creole.

Along Prairie Street, before we came in to the Wortham Center, an alleged Katrina survivor (there are between 100,000 and 200,000 of the real deal living mostly desperate lives here in Houston five months on) asked for money. So we know from Louisiana here. And even if Mr. P can't get the geography right, y'ad think someone in the early 21st century would get their head out of a libretto long enough to snap to the geography of the site of the biggest storm since Noah.

And all that said, you know, who cares? It was breathtaking. Those guys could sing the phone book and yadda yadda yadda ...

We were provided free tickets by my friend Lana, a former Ukrainian who was sponsoring the Russian tenor (the gambler). His name is Vladimir Galouzine (in stage photo above, and with me in dressing room). We met him after the show. Lovely man. Dressing room smelled of cigarette smoke!

It was a lovely night.