Opera at Edinburgh Festival Theatre: Falstaff
The audience at intermission. We had to be the most poorly-dressed people there. Youngest, too, so maybe it was okay.
I was nervous that I wasn't going to enjoy my first time at the opera. My family really likes musicals and while I can always sit through the entire performance, it's not always easy. And that's with them singing in English.
From the list of musicals I've seen, there are two that I'm really glad I saw. Phantom of the Opera, because it's pretty good as a musical but perhaps more because they had some serious pyrotechnics at one point. The stage had cleared and flames shot out of the floor, blasting the audience with a heat wave.
Two is Evita because the humour is wry, the story powerful, and the music catchy.
Mike and Dan in the opera house. We actually had really good seats despite the discount tickets.
Tonight's showing of Flagstaff had neither pyrotechnics nor catchy tunes but it did have dry wit and an amusing story. The singing was amazing. It was hard to believe how the actors could project so much power as to fill such a big room. I can't say I was as deeply moved by the voices as I might have expected for an opera. Might just be because of the nature of the story—it was a comedy. A couple technical problems held the show back a bit, though.
The supertitles were quite high up above the action and you had to intentionally shift your gaze from the words to the action; you couldn't half-watch both like you can with subtitles on the TV screen.
The Edinburgh Festival Theatre where we saw Verdi's last opera, Flagstaff.
There was also a glitch that left us without subtitles for a good three or four minutes and I felt like we missed a pretty crucial part of the story. Opening night glitch, I guess.
It was well worth the money, though. Being under twenty-six, Mike and I got £42 seats for just £10. All said, the four flat mates who went had a great time and they're already talking about going again. I'll probably wait for a different opera house before I see another show.