A new season is upon us!
RcGu...@aol.com
, are too small to spend
anything near list price for regular tickets so Senior Rush ($32 for the
best remaining seat in the house at time of purchase 
) turned me on. Now I try
to publicize both series through occasional eBlasts.
! One
of the goals of the Group is to keep the cost down. If you have an
individual ticket you want to sell (or give away ), you can also post that to
the Group. 
The trucks pulled in behind the Metropolitan Opera House, and stagehands began unloading sets for Bizet’s “Carmen,” hauling them onto a mammoth elevator, similar to those on aircraft carriers, and storing the disassembled pieces of Spain below the stage between a patch of Scotland from Verdi’s “Macbeth” and bits of Paris from Puccini’s “La Bohème.”
Upstairs, Tom O’Brien was at his iron, pressing some of the fabric — he will press more than a mile of it by the end of the season — that the Met’s costume shop cuts and sews each year into hundreds of costumes. Ilya Shevel was painting a gangplank for John Adams’s opera “The Death of Klinghoffer,” which some Jewish groups plan to protest next week. And Tom Watson, who runs the wig department, was placing curlers in the hand-tied blond wig that the soprano Anna Netrebko will wear next week when she stars as Lady Macbeth, perhaps Verdi’s most villainous diva.
“Finally, I can be myself,” Ms. Netrebko said, with a mischievous smile, of her portrayal.
The opera season that was nearly derailed by a labor dispute this summer was getting underway, and a day spent backstage at the Met this week as the company prepared for its opening night on Monday provided a snapshot of the work, care and expense that go into putting on opera: something the company has done for nearly 131 years, but will now try to do a bit more frugally.
The Met is an enormous operation — more than 1,500 people go to work there some days — and the weeks before opening night are among the busiest of the year. Seven different operas were rehearsed in the final preseason week, with some of the world’s top singers, conductors and directors rubbing shoulders in a crowded opera house whose busy electricians, carpenters, artisans and tailors give it the feel of a light industrial park tucked away on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.
There was little immediate evidence of stinting backstage as the Met began to put into action the budget cuts it agreed to as part of the union agreements it reached last month. The company said it needed to cut its costs, because recent box office struggles, and a budget that has grown to more than $300 million a year, had left it overly reliant on the kindness of donors. Its labor battles ended with agreements to cut $90 million in expenses over the next four years: half as pay cuts and half as other kinds of budget cuts. Peter Gelb, the Met’s general manager, said he hoped to accomplish those cuts without dimming any of the grandeur in the Met’s brand of grand opera.
“One of the advantages of having a budget as large as ours — which is mostly a disadvantage — is that because it’s so large, it’s possible to trim in ways that I believe will be imperceptible,” said Mr. Gelb, who began the process this month by eliminating 22 positions from the Met’s administrative staff, mostly through layoffs. “It’s the age-old dilemma of quality versus expense, but I believe we can cut and still maintain quality.”
“We’re cutting back in ways that will make each production slightly riskier,” Mr. Gelb said. “But we’re taking, as we always do, calculated risks.” As examples, he said that the Met might make fewer costumes for understudies, or there might be “an hour here or there of extra rehearsal time that we just aren’t going to allow.”
“But we’re not going to be throwing productions on the stage,” he said. “They will be properly rehearsed.”
There were plenty of forces in place for Monday’s flurry of rehearsals: the casts of several operas; three dozen dancers; a score of assistant conductors and pianists; more than a dozen stage directors; the Met’s orchestra and chorus; and a stage crew of 90 working on carpentry, sound, props and lighting. That included Tim Guscott, a stage electrician who works in the highest reaches of the opera house, in a booth in the ceiling behind the main Sputnik chandelier, and uses a modified telescope sight to aim a 3,000-watt xenon follow spotlight on singers six stories below him and more than 150 feet away. He said it had grown trickier as opera singers had become more mobile, and he recalled the murmurs in the lighting booth when Ms. Netrebko had made her Met debut.
“She was so acrobatic we were like, ‘What is going on down there, because it’s not ballet season?’ ” he said.
On the stage far below him was the new production of Mozart’s “Le Nozze di Figaro” that is to open the season, with James Levine, the Met’s music director, in the pit.
Three stories below that, Fabio Luisi, the Met’s principal guest conductor, led a rehearsal of “Macbeth” that afternoon, starring Ms. Netrebko, Zeljko Lucic (in the title role) and René Pape, while the cast of Mozart’s “Die Zauberflöte” practiced in a rehearsal room across the hall, and a team of dancers in a nearby studio ran through the flamenco-like steps they will dance in “Carmen.” The Met’s chorus members, who were Spaniards in the “Figaro” rehearsal in the morning, were Jews and Palestinians in “Klinghoffer” at a special chorus rehearsal in the afternoon.
