by The upside of living on a modest budget is when someone has an extra ticket to something you could NEVER afford, and you walk down to your seats, and they are three rows from the stage, just off center, it feels so great you just have to scream (as quietly as you can manage, and with your hands over your mouth)! It wouldn’t have felt that delicious if I spent every Friday night like this.
My choir friend Barbara, who appears in my singing book, offered her extra ticket to Mark Morris’s Acis and Galatea.
I could see the faces and expressions of the orchestra, the choir, the dancers, and the stars/singers. When the conductor Nicholas McGegan turned around to so charmingly smile at the audience while he was conducting, I was close enough to try to catch his eye when I smiled back. There was a lot of humor in the expressions of the dancers that I’m sure I would have missed if I wasn’t so close.
Everything was perfection, the dancers and the choreography, the music of course, I love Handel, but the orchestra and the choir! (Major envy, by the way. Imagine being good enough to make a living by singing in a choir like that.) And I fell in love with each of the singers. I can be very picky about sopranos, but Yulia Van Doren has all the qualities I want in a soprano, she was marvelous. Oh, and the lighting, and the set, and the costumes (Isaac Mizrahi). Every element of this production worked wonderfully.
Thank you Barbara and Mark Morris and everyone involved in this production. How lucky I felt to get to sit back and enjoy all this enormous talent! Just right there in front of me. I have a sense of how much work went on behind the scenes to bring us to this night. I honestly felt the love and joy, and the creepy part, although hard not to fall for that tall, handsome, and funny baritone anyway. I loved when he lazed about on the floor, ignoring Damon’s advice for wooing Galatea.
Here they are, taking their well-deserved bows. Mark Morris is way to the right and out of focus in my shot so I didn’t include him!
