Opera & Movie Review

Last weekend, I was asked to go to see my very first Opera performance at Lincoln Center. In general, I can’t say that it’s my kind of performance; while the soundtrack and the level of effort the participants put into making it run smoothly were both undeniable, I couldn’t immerse myself into it no matter how hard I tried for a variety of reasons. For one, (although this is no one’s fault in particular, I’m sure Opera tickets aren’t known for their affordability), I constantly had to deal with the feeling of not being entirely present, simply due to the sheer distance from the stage. The view itself was fine, I just felt..kind of far from all of the action. It certainly didn’t help that I didn’t figure out how to turn captions on until well after the first segment, so I had to constantly keep up using the very little Italian that I knew. That kind of undermined the lack of a smooth progression of the plot that I felt consistently throughout the play. The few brief references to France’s state as a country around the time were pretty interesting, however, even if they didn’t really contribute to a cohesive narrative as much as the abject poverty the characters constantly wrestled with. Overall, while the Opera was no doubt exciting to watch, I couldn’t really appreciate it for what it was trying to say or do.


Now, onto the comparison between the opera and Rent. In general, I found the latter to be much more readily applicable to our existing social context, and, more generally, reality. While watching Rent, I actually felt like I was watching something that could have happened in recent, living memory. I guess the whole “East Village, struggling to make rent and even survive, gritty” nature of the movie turned out to be more relatable than 1840s Paris, where tuberculosis ran rampant. The general sense of community that each character was able to experience also helped tremendously, as, unlike in the play where it felt more like everyone had, at least partially, their own separate lives and plots, there was a much clearer sense of community. That’s part of the appeal Rent had in my case; additionally, I enjoyed how much more fluid the movie actually felt, particularly when placed against the Opera. It feels like Rent was also much more accurate in reflecting the typical lives which artists experience. Obviously, there were time constraints, but it felt like each of the individual parts were overly discrete and completely independent of one another. Angel’s death was also far sadder than Mimi’s, which, honestly, came out of nowhere besides very flimsy foreshadowing in the form of a cough in the Winter.

As you can probably conclude, I enjoyed Rent far more than I did the Opera. It felt infinitely more “real” and relevant to the times we live in, in clear contrast to the Orleanist-era play I experienced, and also allowed for far more attachment to the characters.