part of an opera review: The Magic Flute

I'd had no idea Mozart could be so boring.

I've seen other Mozart operas staged before - The Marriage of Figaro, Don Giovanni, Cosi fan tutte - and they were all beautiful and imaginative. But this - this is a cut-rate opera. Mozart throws off an endless series of empty display pieces, and that's all that there is.

Furthermore, it's nearly three hours long. At the end of the first of two acts, I gave up and bailed out. I was sorry to miss the Queen of the Night's famous aria, which is in Act 2, but judging from the performance of her Act 1 aria, I probably didn't miss much.

The one good thing about the show, which I'm sorry I missed the rest of, was the staging, which featured the cleverest and most imaginative animated backgrounds imaginable. The singers stood in front of a white wall, sometimes on little platforms emerging from the wall when they needed to be high up. The animation was projected on to the wall and they interacted with it. That only explains how it worked, but what the designers did with it can hardly be adequately described.