Met Opera Dress Rehearsal - anyone done it?

[Play Esq.]

Posted: 2/17/09 at 11:15am

Slightly off topic, but I am sure that someone from this message board has attended one of the Met's open dress rehearsals. If you have, how early did you show up prior to ticket distribution? Where were your seats? How was the experience?

Thanks for the help!

[Dollypop]

Posted: 2/17/09 at 12:47pm

I was friends with the late tenor Jerry Hadley and attended many dress rehearsals of his performances at the Met. For the most part, you get a full production but some of the singers "save" their voices for actual performances and just "mark" their way through the dress. Other singers actually skip the big notes completely.

I always had my tickets in advance, so I don't know about arrival times.

[Play Esq.]

Posted: 2/17/09 at 1:24pm

Thank you for the insight. It sounds like a wonderful experience.

Anyone done it recently and wait in line for tickets? I believe the last few were Verdi's "Il Travatore" and Berlioz's "Damnation of Faust." Next up: Bellini's "La Sonnambula"

[wonkit]

Posted: 2/17/09 at 1:27pm

Since Sonnambula includes Juan Diego Florez, don't ask, just GO. Even if he marks some of the role, he is worth watching.

[Play Esq.]

Posted: 2/17/09 at 1:47pm

Couldn't agree with you more...and the role of Amina is being played by Natalie Dessay.

I just would rather NOT arrive at the Met hours before I actually need to.

[frogs_fan85]

Posted: 2/18/09 at 8:04pm

The other open houses this season were Doctor Atomic and Damnation of Faust. Regular dress rehearsals (like the Il Trovatore last Friday) you have to be either a guild member or a patron to get into. They will start giving away tickets for La Sonnambula at 11 AM. There are 4000 spots (although I don't think they're giving out most of the orchestra, the center parterre, or standing room spaces, so let's call it 3000 actually) in the theater and each person can get two tickets, so it would take a quite awhile for them to exhaust the supply of tickets. The tickets can and will be anywhere in the house.

Dollypop is right about the rehearsals themselves. You get the full production just not in full voice usually.

You will need to get there fairly early though. The lines at the Met can get insane. Speaking from experience there was a five hour line over the summer when the box office opened for just ticket exchanges, so you can imagine how crazy it would be for free tickets. I was not there for the Faust giveaway (they tried to pay me to work the weekend, but I wasn't having it), so I can't give a fair assessment. The Doctor Atomic open house was exclusively for high school and college students involved in the sciences because of the opera's subject matter.