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It was as though each spectator had a front-row seat. For most of the viewers in other theatres than the Metropolitan, the action on the stage was brought up close. Davis, in charge of lighting, kept the images moving according to the needs of the story.įrom all over the country there were reports of good sound and improved visual projection. There was a large screen on the wall and Kirk Browning, director, and Robert W. In a large room off the dress circle was the television crew with its monitors, cables and headphones. There were banks of spots along the sides of the proscenium and brilliant lights played from the directors' and artists' boxes on the grand tier floor, near the stage. The opera house was brighter than it has ever been during a performance. Lighting and staging had been changed for the telecast. Cameras and their crews occupied two of the boxes in the Golden Horseshoe, and there were cameras in the orchestra pit sharing space with the conductor and the members of the orchestra. The atmosphere in the Opera House here was conditioned by the fact that the opening was on closed-circuit television. Efforts to obtain from the Metropolitan Opera Company or from Theatre Television Network a complete list of cities showing the telecast were unsuccessful. There ware theatres in the Bronx and Brooklyn as well as in such cities as Albany, Buffalo, Camden, Baltimore, Richmond, Pittsburg, Erie, Detroit, Cleveland, Cincinnati, Milwaukee, Dallas, Houston, Tulsa and Salt Lake City that carried the Metropolitan opening night. In each town chapters of the Metropolitan Opera Guild or some charity helped to arrange the event and tickets were as high as $7 in some places. It was impossible last night to calculate exactly how many people had shared in this nation-wide opera opening, but the capacity of all the theatres on the hook-up was close to 80,000, and it was estimated that 70,000 persons had purchased tickets. As in New York, there were dinner parties before the opera, and audiences, representing leaders of their communities, turned out in their finery, although many people went in everyday clothes as they might to a neighborhood movie. In some other cities, where the opera performance was projected on a large screen, the opening was also turned into an occasion. It was an audience drawn from the cream of business, finance, the arts and society, and it put on a glittering fashion display.īut this time it was not an exclusively New York show. An audience of 3,800 paid a total of $62,438, with seats on the orchestra floor, bringing $30 each. The source from which all the excitement flowed, the Metropolitan Opera House, glowed with its customary opening-night glamour. Last night's closed circuit transmission was the first for which the technicians had ample time and facilities to prepare. The opening night has been televised for home screens several times in the past, but these telecasts were virtually on a catch-as-catch-can basis. The hook-up this year had almost ten months preparation and since it involved an opening night it attracted much wider interest. Because the arrangements for the telecast were made at short notice and because the performance took place a few weeks before Christmas, the venture was not profitable. Two seasons ago Carmen was presented in this way. This was not the first time that a Metropolitan Opera performance was telecast on a closed circuit. Louis, Denver, Los Angeles and San Francisco. What has been a gala evening for seven decades in the venerable opera house on Broadway and Thirty-ninth Street became a festive occasion also in such widely separated communities as Philadelphia, Chicago, Indianapolis, St. Thanks to closed-circuit television, the largest paying audience in the opera's history paid its way in to take part in an opening night. The Metropolitan Opera last night opened its new season not only in its own seventy-one year-old theatre but in thirty-two other houses in more than twenty-five cities from coast to coast. Nation Shares 'Met' Opening in Gala Theater-TV Parties Account on the Front Page of The New York Times by Howard Taubman