![]() ![]() That was the first opportunity to truly look out at the house, which on Friday was nearly full. As is often the case with eye-candy productions like this “Aida,” the curtain, after dropping, is opened again to let the audience appreciate the tableau. Once they returned, they were dressed in the dark, just as rapidly as they’d been disrobed.Ī few minutes later, we marched one last time, to fill out the set for the scene’s climactic final measures. Then the actors, wearing only their skirts, picked up trophies of war for their next trip. After my squad made its way across the stage, our bows and quivers were quickly deposited while Evelyn Herman and some of her teammates collected our costumes. The scene makes it seem as though an infinite stream of soldiers is passing through in reality, it’s the same group. Trickier, though, is what happens immediately after the march. “That’s why I get very personal about the squads if someone tries to say something about them.” “It’s not as easy as it looks,” Smith said. ![]() There’s something about a person telling you to walk a specific way that makes you suddenly forget how to walk at all. The less thought put into the march itself, the better. “Yeah, I try not to drink too much water before,” Bradford said. It was then, not long before we went out to march, that I thought about what might happen if someone needed to use the restroom. We had been at the Met for at least an hour and a half, setting up roughly 20 minutes of our contribution to the Triumphal Scene. Some places were tight on a ramp where we had gathered, Latonia Moore, the soprano singing Aida, rushed through saying, “Hi, sorry, this is crazy, sorry.” After a couple of tries - the first was deemed by onlookers “C-plus” at best - we gathered our weapons and waited behind the hulking set. We were told to keep our left arms down and straight, and to flex our right arms, which would be holding bows, to show off our martial might. “Left, left, left, right, left” was announced with mantra-like repetition. (As someone who was taking more than giving, I wasn’t paid.) Experienced actors, however, they promptly assembled behind our squad leader - Germaine Franco, a 6-foot-something man made taller by his egg-shaped helmet - for a dry run of the march. Each performance, about two hours of work, a squad soldier makes about $41. Neither of them had been to the Met before their auditions, nor were they familiar with “Aida.” Now, they were contracted for the whole revival, through the spring. His worry: “I’m nervous I’m going to trip.” To assist me in figuring out the confusing strap of my quiver, there was CJ DiOrio, a recent New York University musical theater graduate, for whom this gig was his biggest yet. I received crucial help from Anthony Bradford, an actor who has done mostly film and TV, he said, but is now trying to add more theater experience to his résumé. Members of my squad got to know one another. Dancers were warming up for their Act II performances, while the horses hung out with their handlers, sometimes dropping a stinky pile that was hastily cleaned up, away from the audience’s eye. ![]() We were summoned with a call: “It’s go time! Squad time! Everyone follow me.” Then it was off to the Met’s stage level to practice our marches in the wings, down stairs and past the many signs that had been taped to walls to guide newcomers around the building. Frisell’s old-fashioned “Aida” will be replaced with one by Michael Mayer in two seasons tellingly, his won’t have any horses. Slowly, though, those dinosaurs are going the way of the, well, dinosaurs. This “Aida” is a holdout from theater’s big-hair days, when Broadway was decorated with the marquees of Cameron Mackintosh productions like “Cats,” “Les Misérables” and “The Phantom of the Opera.” The Met, too, seemed to operate under the belief that sets were as important as stars. Andrei Konchalovsky’s staging of “War and Peace” is the largest, though it’s almost never put on more likely to come around is Franco Zeffirelli’s cinematic “La Bohème,” or Sonja Frisell’s 1988 “Aida,” which returned, one last time, on Friday. I can tell you, because I just did it.Īs a longtime audience member, I’ve always been intrigued by the grandest of the Met’s productions - the ones with a cast that far outnumbers the company’s chorus roster. It’s possible to go from zero singing experience to the stage of the Metropolitan Opera. ![]()
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