A Little Night Music, A Lot of Nosh
Free opera too populist? Compensate with a million dollar picnic.

What: The Met's Opera In the Park
Location: Central Park and other locations
Date Through September 2, 2006
Cost: FREE
Bohemian Factor: Present, but counterbalanced by the midtown post-workday suit set.
Geek Factor: Many, many opera geeks; all purpose nerds are few and far in between.

For some of us, it is hard not to have a good time at Opera In the Park . Close seats go to early birds, rather than millionaire donors, you can munch down dinner while the orchestra warms up, you can lie down and try to find Orion while Mark Delevan sings an aria. You can enjoy the theater of latecomers trying to find each other with cell phone rings, balloons shaped like Sesame Street characters, and funny little dances in place. You can close your eyes and pretend you just paid $300 for your "orchestra" seat, sans comfortable chair and caption system.

Of course, whether your reasons for being there are rooted in passion for opera, free City events, or big outdoor cocktail parties, there are a couple of conditions that make things more complicated:

-Trying to meet up with anyone.

Woe to the poor soul who arrives at 7:45 pm, with a precious 15 minutes to circumnavigate a labyrinthine maze of tarps, beach chairs, Balducci’s bags, and leap frog over the most elaborately laid out picnic displays I have ever seen. At last Wednesday's performance of Verdi’s “Rigoletto,” one group of pretty young people seems to have an entire cheese-tasting station, complete with different knives for each stinky round of Murray's laid out with cute little plastic wine glasses (goodbye to the enforcement of Central Park’s no alcohol policy), while several families are enjoying a multi-course Italian meal, complete with platters of antipasti and –dear lord – figs wrapped in prosciutto. (Come to think of it, why didn’t I think of this? I begin to feel embarrassed about the Tasti-D-Lite I slurped down while racing to the M4 bus)

Plus, there are extensive police barrier-like divisions between sections of the Lawn laid out with a geometry not unlike the borders of tiny Latin American countries. Upon standing no less than 30 feet from my companions, I am sent by police officers back to the other side of the Lawn, only to have to weave my way back through an even farther distance from the other side, on account of the pathway that has been cleared, presumably, for pedestrian traffic (which would of course, explain, why no one was allowed to traverse it). On top of this, there are picnic baskets, baby baskets, and most treacherous of all – thousands of little tea lights. It’s amazing to me that the Great Lawn is not going up in flames every time someone knocks over a bottle of sun dried tomatoes.

-Having to leave before the end, for any reason. Or even having to move.

It doesn’t matter if you have to call the babysitter, go to the bathroom, or suddenly need to go to an emergency room. The general darkness (there are only stage lights), the evil barriers mentioned above, and the ever-present threat of stepping on someone’s wine and platters, all bestow heaps of redeeming values onto those tea lights that seemed so pesky at the beginning of the evening. The inability to get back to the main paths without a hacksaw or a pair of stilts, now matter how close by, makes finding a comfortable position a do-or-die proposition. (“I enjoyed eet very much,” said a heavily accented European fellow upon thanking me for borrowing a towel, which he had to lay out in a narrow slot between two massive picnicking apparatuses. “But eet was long, too long, I theenk.”)

-You are picky about the voices.

Given all the technical considerations that are taken into consideration when architects build concert halls and opera houses, it is not really fair to expect the Great Lawn to embody accoustic majesty. The Met has set up a sort of central sound-techie headquarters not unlike mission control in Sci-Fi channel low budget series. But this is not the place to discern a subtle shift in the volume dynamics, perfect diction on multi-syllabic explanations or nuanced trills unadulterated by the unexpected crinkles of the miking system. A JFK bound flight rumbles above and someone’s cell phone is sure to start regurgitating some 80's pop song.

Did I say I love opera in the park? The City skyline glitters in the distance over the Great Lawn, and when Delevan -playing the court jester, Rigoletto - sings an agonizing cry recalling the curse he's been doomed to fulfill, you forget where you are entirely, until a plane flies overhead. Or someone steps on a plastic wineglass.