A Trip Into Boston For Opera

Yesterday was Mother's Day for the millions, but I went to the opera, the final performance of Boston Lyric Opera's production of "I Puritani."  I had never seen it, do not often go to the opera in Boston since Sarah Caldwell ended her spectacular if ill managed reign, and had never heard this bel canto masterpiece in the theater, knew it only from the recording of Maria Callas, who was party to the revival in interest in bel canto some fifty or sixty years ago.  It seemed like a good idea; my younger daughter was game to go with me.  It was an extraordinary trial, and I suppose we have to say a testimony of my love of culture.  You can perhaps get a better sense of why the gentry on the South Shore seem so philistine; it is so very very difficult for the culture bees to get into their pots of honey in Boston.  No commuter train on the weekends, a response say the MBTA to comparatively lower interest, one of those chicken or the egg things, and the Red Line which first you have to get to over roads that are narrow and clogged with madmen steering and putting on the speed whilst glued to their cellphones, well, the Red Line, as usual, is "undergoing repairs on the weekend" requiring its long suffering, patrons, to leave the train and enter a bus at JJK for a two stop ride to Broadway where the train starts up again.  This festive jaunt combines the push pull crowded hilarity that attends any out of the ordinary excursion involving the young with the honest to god exhaustion that is the result of going up and down, down and up, narrow crowded subway station stairs, and of holding on in a torture of crazy balance as the special buses lurch and speed their passengers on and around the corners.  I suppose being eighty four in this mix means that my point of view can scarcely count as representing the norm and what is more perhaps suggests why I should stay home abed in situations like this.  But there is no other way to get from the South Shore to Boston and dammit, I thought after two years that damn subway repair would be finished.  Clearly age and experience have taught me nothing.  Still the opera, though a mixed bag with two males whom I found slight and one who was strong in voice and gesture, was altogether made beautiful and compelling and brought me to tears again and again in the great bel canto arias of Elvira gone mad with what she perceives as the betrayal of her lover.  From those few words you can guess that the plot is as loony as they get, made even wilder and more fun by a directorial decision that at the end when the star crossed lovers are reunited and it turns out Arturo will not be executed because the Catholics and the Protestants have signed an amnesty and there is a general reprieve, and any rational person is suppressing yet another giggle at the improbable turn of this nutty story, the director  will have none of this all around sappiness and the losing lover Riccardo reaches into the folds of his cloak finds a sharp and glittering knife and plunges it into the back of Arturo who is deep into an embrace of Elvira, and the curtain comes down.  Take that, you happy ending!  Take that, Arturo, if you think for a moment that I, Riccardo, have any of the customary gentlemanly qualms at stabbing my opponent in the back! A fine solution in keeping with the crazy milling about throughout the opera's action of a chorus of soldiers with shiny helmets and long shiny pikes doing their darndest to suggest, at least to me, the sexual desire  a-foot by their penis-like accoutrements, who appear in scene after scene where romantic intimacy and mad desire are afoot, and in an rational assessment they would be otiose.  Their female counterparts who bound about like Wellesley girls on May Day, although here cloaked in bright red--mad desire?, hymens shattered? hard to say--perhaps are meant to suggest the erotics bubbling up in Elvira as she grows deeper into mad infatuation and then sinks into her madness.  The mad scenes are worth the show: Bellini's bel canto music is intoxicating, Sarah Coburn is beautiful, a strong actress who delivers mad and sad and miserable and lost with powerful gesture with consistently great vocals and looks a bit like Carrie Bradshaw which makes the over the top quality of this bel canto moment seem an entirely probable action of the girl next door.