Our first Opera - hooray for supertitles!

It was a wonderful evening out with my youngest daughter last night. I really enjoy these one-on- one social opportunities with my children, perhaps now even more than when they were younger. We both agreed, our first Opera was worth the effort!

Don Giovanni is the Mozart Opera about the hedonistic life and predictable end of an 18th Century Spanish womanizer (Don Juan) who actually sings the words, "to be faithful to one woman is to cause all others to suffer," or some facsimile of that phrase.

The Utah Opera will open Don Giovanni at the Capitol Theater this Saturday (May 10.)

The performance which Nat and I saw last night was the first dress rehearsal, and we both agreed that it would be unfair to critique the performance itself because; 1) it was the first rehearsal with the Symphony in attendance, 2) at a dress rehearsal the performers are not expected to be completely in sync, and 3) most importantly, we are new to Opera.

As we drove home last night, we spoke of the experience itself. We decided that supertitles are very cool. While we both noticed that you can begin to get a feel for the story and words without them, they added the detail to allow it to be more than pretty sets, beautiful music, and great costumes.

Nat is sure she knows Don Giovanni. She believes she met him at work. Don Giovanni infuriated her, a good sign that Christopher Schaldenbrand did a nice job portraying him. But she also thought that Elvira was quite a whiner and needed to get over it.

I loved the music - after all I have always been a fan of Mozart, and it was beautifully performed under the direction of Robert Tweten. We both thought the sets were very well done. And we didn't see any very large women in viking hats and decided that we ought to try this again.

All told, we spent about 3-hours in our seats, and parts of our bodies numbed and ached by the time we stood at the intermission and again at the end of the performance. At one time the Capitol Theater was state of the art in theaters, but we now find modern cinema theaters more comfortable and less restrictive. Now, if you moved the Opera to the Larry Miller Theaters at Jordan Commons or The District ... well, perhaps a new generation of Opera lovers would find the way to embrace it.

During Intermission, Nat noted that the chandelier is attached to what appears to be half of a large golf ball. We decided that when you look at the ceiling from the balcony you could be seeing what an ant might see looking up from the grass of a Tee box at a golf ball on a tee (Nat and I both golf.) We also commented on the curtain graphics, the aforementioned discomfort of the seats, the way one patron was wearing his headset and how one performer went down during the first act. (We wondered if they would shorten her dress - which obviously tripped her up.)

But none of this dimmed the performance for us. We decided that Mozart was brilliant, Opera is a unique and worthwhile experience, and supertitles are not at all annoying, nor did they cause us to miss the action while reading them (which we had feared might be the case.)

Salt Lake City is a small market and we felt pretty lucky to have the very professional Utah Opera company performing so close to our home. Seats at the Capitol Theater don't bring near the discomfort that Airport security, airline seats and taxi drivers do.