The Met by Wire

The movie managers played it big. In Omaha, red carpeting was stretched from curb to lobby; in Asbury Park, N. J., advertisements invited people to come in evening clothes (but very few did); in Richmond, Va., the popcorn machine was hauled out of sight for the night. Ticket prices were scaled as high as $7.20. Finally, when all was in readiness, some 60,000 customers marched into theaters in 27 cities to see a live performance of Carmen, coming from the Metropolitan Opera in Manhattan over closed-circuit television.

In a good many ways it was a disappointment. Visually, most of Carmen came through flat and featureless. The second-act inn looked more like a cavern than a tavern, and in the long shots the singers were as faceless as blips on a radar screen. Moreover, there was trouble with the sound reproduction in some theaters. Reported Critic Claudia Cassidy in the Chicago Tribune: "What the sound equipment was up to, besides sandblasting, I'm not certain."

But audiences took the whole experiment in better part. They admired the well-timed camera work and the sense of almost being on the stage. In the closeups, they saw Singers Rise Stevens and Richard Tucker in more detail than any spectators at the Met were seeing them. In general, they seemed to share the illusion of the opera house, and burst into applause after the arias. Most of them forgave first-try mistakes.

Theater managers, too, were warily happy; the performance lured a special audience into their show places, and some of them even showed a profit. Theater Network Television, which arranged the showing, recognized its mistakes, thought it could clear up line troubles next time, even if it couldn't make dark scenes on the Met stage come through bright.

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