A Night at the Opera

My first real production was a graduation gift from a family friend. They took me to see Phantom of the Opera in Charlotte. It was an amazing production, the singers were magnificent, the costumes amazing, the acting fantastic. That was my first taste, and let me tell you I was hooked right then and there. Since then, I have seen a few shows here and there, Wicked with my sisters and mom, Nutcracker with E. Those are all spectacular. However, nothing can quiet compare to what I was able to do here. It started with visiting the Sydney Opera House.

If I can recommend anything to architecture majors, if you come to Sydney go on the tour. You have to. First you get to hear the story behind the House. Second, you get to see the House up close and personal. Third, you get to ask all the questions you can imagine. The House was built in the 70's and the design came out of a contest. The guy who won drew really rough sketches had incomplete notes and it seemed liked it was just thrown together. However, he won because he was different. He dared to come up with something completely new and original. That is a lesson I think we can all learn from. Just be different, you might win the biggest commission of your life time. Also on a side note, I kept thinking of Fountainhead the entire time. Every time the mentioned the word commission, or never been done before, or original, or not expected, I had a flashback to some random page of some Roark design. Anywho, the story is incredible. The engineering more spectacular. Those sails are engineered beautifully out of the simple design of a circle. Take a circle make a bunch of slices, rearrange them, join them together and you have the Opera House. Seems simple right. It wasn't.


There is nothing simple about this building. Take the tiles for instance, you would think they are all white. They aren't. There are over 16 shades, all placed in a particular pattern so that they catch the light and glimmer. They are also self cleaning and require no gutters. Why? because the ground is engineered to hide all of that system, carry the water into sea, and it is never seen. Simple task, made not so simple. The only thing that was simple surprisingly was the appearance of the theaters. They took their time building each and every concert hall, opera stage, etc for their purpose. The concert hall where the Symphony plays has to be one of the best acoustical rooms ever. No echo, a single sound fills the entire room, it is perfect. The opera theaters are designed so that the singers do not need to use microphones. Their voices fill the entire room. The stage however is simple. It is just a black picture frame around the stage. It lets everything else stand out. That was seriously the only simple thing in that whole building.

The best part of the whole entire tour was that I got to see it in action. The House does this really neat thing with tickets. An hour before the show, they sell any unused tickets to students only for 50 dollars no matter where the seats are. That means you can get front row or even box seats for 50 bucks. We got the second best priced seats you can get, so 200 dollar tickets for 50 bucks. That incredible. Yep. So my night at the opera started off just splendidly. Run to McDonalds for a meatless dinner, thank you ash wednesday. This was the start of a great night.

In our best dresses brought, which wasn't that nice, we entered the House with a reason to be there. We found our amazing seats, and the lights dimmed. First off, I have never seen an opera so I don't know what to expect. Second, my first opera is in the Sydney Opera House. You cannot cannot get better than that. There is humanly no possible way, no matter what the show was like, that anything can beat this. The curtain rose up, and the music of Carmen started playing. The orchestra was fantastic. The strings and flutes were amazing. They were also showcased throughout the night which was pretty impressive. Carmen is a french opera set in spain. They sing in french, but luckily enough they had English surtitles above the stage. The basic plot line is about this excuse my language but slutty gypsie. She is. I am not exaggerating. She sings a whole song about how boys love her and she uses that to her advantage. That to me is slutty. Anyway, she gets put in prison, convinces the guard to let her go, he falls in love with her, follows her, then goes mad with jealousy as she flirts with everyone else. She then falls in love with another guy, the guard goes mad and kills her. So typical love story right.

The voices were fantastic for the most part. Only, I cannot really judge because I don't know what counts as a good opera voice. Anyway, Carmen i thought could have been better. She had a powerful voice, I just didn't like her tone. Don Jose, the main guy role, had a spectacularly smooth voice. It was less operatic than the others, but I liked it so so much more. He was perfect for the part. The best voice of the night has to go hands down to a minor character. Micaela is a young girl from Don Jose's hometown that is sent to carry a message to him from his dying mother. She is in love with Don Jose, and they sing this epic song. Her voice was spectacular. I can see why she wasn't given the lead, she wasn't as dominating of a presence as Carmen; however, when she sang people listened. In a few years, I will not be surprised if she is a leading operatic singer. She just goes to show that even small parts have big impacts. She got the loudest ovation. Easily. I was glad to see people acknowledged it too.



So my first opera was spectacular. Thank you mommy and daddy, that was the best birthday present ever. I want to learn all those romantic languages now. I think had I understood french that it would have been even more pretty. However, it was amazing to see how you didn't need to understand the language to know what was going on. You could have not read the surtitles and still been able to pick up on exactly what was going on. That has a lot of credit to the acting. They portrayed the emotions perfectly. It was also a relief to not hear English for a solid three hours. Not once. I love our langugages and to be immersed like that was fantastic.

The next day was followed up by a trip to the blue mountains. The blue mountains are similar to the blue ridge mountains if you took added eucalyptus and removed the potential for bears. It was a very similar feeling hiking though. The most well known feature is the Three Sisters. How appropriate. Allie is the tall skinny one that looks like she is about to topple over. This is by no means a reflection on her, however, that is the one I picked for her. I am the cutest one of course. I get to be the fat one. I take up a lot of space. Then MJ is the short one. I want to super impose all of us beside our formation. I will make it a point to do that. I had a lot of fun there. It was nice to be constantly reminded of my sisters. The legend behind them is also appropriate for us. The three sisters fell in love with three men from another tribe, but they weren't allowed to  marry. So a battle ensued, and the sisters were turned into stone so that they were protected. However, no one ever could turn them back. Yep, that is pretty appropriate. Good job Maggie and Allie, getting us turned into stone...kidding.

The rest of the hike was amazing. Ferns, moss everywhere. Lyre birds. No koalas or snakes. Oh well. You win some you lose some. It was also nice to get back to hiking. I have missed being in New Zealand where I can hike to amazing scenery whenever I wanted. My boots got so much use. I want to use them more. I am making it a point to wear my boots in to the point where I need new ones. Plan of action