Popcorn Opera

The Met Opera's production of Peter Grimes goes local.

Opera on the local silver screen
Edgewater, Clifton theaters 'host' Met

BY EVELYN SHIH

STAFF WRITER

WHAT: The Metropolitan Opera's "Peter Grimes: Live in HD."
WHERE: Edgewater Multiplex Cinemas, 339 River Road, Edgewater. 201-840-0699. AMC Clifton Commons, 405 Route 3 east, Clifton. 973-614-0644. Tickets for both locations available from movie tickets.com.
WHEN: 1:30 p.m. Saturday. Encore showing 1:30 p.m. Sunday at Edgewater Multiplex Cinemas.
HOW MUCH: $22, children $15.

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Chris Diamond is a most unusual opera fan.

For one, he's 13 years old and listens to Linkin Park. For another, he fell in love with the Metropolitan Opera by watching a production in a movie theater. And his dad was one of the people responsible for putting it there.

Dan Diamond, the proud father, is VP of Fathom Entertainment, a company that puts "alternative programming" into 350 movie theaters across the country, including Edgewater Multiplex Cinemas and AMC at Clifton Commons — and even across the globe. Before the Met Opera, Fathom transmitted music performances from the likes of Celine Dion, the Rolling Stones and Coldplay into affiliated theaters.

This by itself may not be enough to excite you. But consider this: The Fathom network has the technology to play performances live. That means that if anything goes wrong at the Met, it's a blunder of international proportions.

"There's an athletic spectacle aspect to opera," says Metropolitan Opera general manager Peter Gelb. "You never know what might happen ... you're always waiting to see if your favorite tenor will hit his high C."

The next live high-definition broadcast from the Met will be the opera "Peter Grimes," set to hit movie theaters in Edgewater and Clifton on Saturday. Gelb says the Benjamin Britten opera is "considered by many to be the greatest 20th-century opera."

Since the Met transmits only eight performances a season, Gelb and his staff try to pick ones that are packed with star power. Saturday's performance of "Peter Grimes" feature Anthony Dean Griffey, who sang the title role at both the Met and the Paris Opera, and leading lady Patricia Racette, winner of the Richard Tucker Award, given to opera performers poised for a national and international career.

"[Live in HD] actually helps us in our casting," Gelb says. "It's much more exciting for the opera stars, knowing that their performance is seen by so many people at the same time — there's much more adrenaline."

The live theater high-definition series began in the 2006-2007 Met season with six performances and was one of the first triumphs in Gelb's career as general manager.

"It's important to present opera as an art form that is vibrant and youthful," says Gelb, adding that the live transmissions have helped the box office at the Met by building a larger fan base. "We are working to keep opera in the cultural mainstream and not become an elitist art form."

Says Diamond: "If I told my young son, 'Hey, we're going to sit for 3½ hours at the Metropolitan Opera,' I don't know if his barriers would have been as easily brought down. ... The theater brings down those preconceived notions that everyone has about certain types of performances and opens their eyes to a whole new world."

But in the beginning the experiment wasn't without glitches. In the first transmission, the subtitles read "English" instead of the actual subtitles.

"I had a sinking feeling in my stomach, because clearly something hadn't been switched on," says Gelb, who acts as executive producer of the taping. It took the staff almost 60 seconds to get the right text onscreen. Luckily, nothing worse has happened so far.

Since then, the opera house stage has been fitted with horizontal and vertical camera tracks that run along the frame of the stage, no more intrusive than the already existing microphones. "With time we have learned how to ideally position them," Gelb says.

Backstage interviews with the cast, crew and other behind-the-scenes staff during intermissions have also become more creative and varied. Shots of performers waiting in the wings before they get onstage are becoming more common.

The advantage of the movie theater screening is that the audience gets the extra content without the solemn atmosphere of the opera house. "People can go out and grab a popcorn and a soda without feeling like they've walked in front of a whole group of people and thrown the actors off timing onstage," Diamond says.

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E-mail: shih@northjersey.com