Backstage Tour of the Met Opera

Met Opera, main staircase.
Photo: Konstantine Sofer 

This past September, I got to visit the American Museum of Natural History after hours and thoroughly enjoyed the feeling of being where and when I was not supposed to be. I decided to relive the experience by taking a backstage tour of the Met Opera.

On Sunday morning, about twenty visitors gathered in the Met lobby and were divided into two groups, each led by a volunteer guide. Our guide was Hillary, a former dancer and now a theater genie in a Christmas sweater, bright red eyeglasses, and with her hair dyed a vibrant shade of red.

The tour started with a brief introduction on the main staircase, after which we proceeded into the auditorium and sat in the front rows to listen to an overview of the Met history. The auditorium, not yet cleaned after the Saturday night performance, was permeated with the characteristic and not unpleasant Met smell and looked like it was resting.

The place is truly enormous. The theater has 3800 seats, placed in a staggered pattern for the best sight lines. The width and spacing between the seats varies, which gives me comfort, because on several occasions I anxiously noted that I was fitting too snugly into my seat. The auditorium is isolated from the outside noise and vibration and has no right angles for optimal acoustics. The walls are covered with African rosewood veneer that came from a single tree, so the entire auditorium responds to sound like a gigantic musical instrument with uniform resonance properties. I recall how during one performance, when I was sitting at the very end of the row, I placed my palm on the wall and felt how the veneer vibrated with the sound from the stage. I found this sensation strangely moving: it felt as though the house was being animated by the music.

The lobby and the auditorium are illuminated by the Lobmeyr chandeliers. Designed in 1963, these crystal confections, nicknamed “sputniks”, were a gift from the Austrian government in recognition of the US help in the post-war restoration efforts and in 2008 were refurbished with sponsorship from Swarovski. Just before the performance is about to begin, the auditorium chandeliers are raised to the ceiling. We recently noted that how you perceive the trajectory of these celestial snowflakes is highly significant. Most of my opera-going history passed right under the Met’s gilded ceiling, in the euphemistically named Family Circle, where the chandeliers travel towards you. Only recently, with marginal improvements in my financial situation and significant declines in the Met ticket sales, did I get to sit in the lower levels, where the chandeliers float by you. The holders of the orchestra seats may never even see the flight of the “sputniks”, unless they crane their necks at precarious angles. 

In October 1995, the theater unveiled the Met Titles, a system of individual 8-by-2-inch displays for supertitles of opera translations. Our guide told us that the idea for these displays came to one of the theater executives when he was on the plane, watching a movie on a screen installed in the back of the seat in front of him. The displays have a narrow viewing angle, so you are not distracted by your neighbors’ screens, and their brightness is adjusted to match the lighting level onstage. The setup is a stroke of genius and a special gift for the lovers of the wordy German operas. It is also habit-forming: I found myself reading the English titles during The Queen of Spades and Eugene Onegin, which were performed in flawless Russian!

The Met stage width is twice the length of a basketball court. A system of computerized side stage wagons for moving sets has been recently installed replacing the forty-year-old manual wagons. A rear stage wagon with a turntable is still the original one.

The Met is among the few opera houses in the US that employ prompters: the Met has five prompters, and Lyric Opera of Chicago, San Francisco Opera, and Los Angeles Opera each have one prompter. I always thought that the prompter’s function was to supply the lines to the singers, but it turns out that the prompter is more like a conductor’s deputy. In her small space at the proscenium, the prompter has two video screens showing the conductor and a house phone. She communicates with the singers by clicking or “kissing” sounds and gestures, mimes words and emotions, keeps singers on the beat, gives cues, and is likely to be the first person to notice if something goes wrong on stage. Performers in the rear stage, who cannot see either the conductor or the prompter, rely on video screens showing the conductor.

Then we were taken backstage, down the corridor on left side of the auditorium, past the VIP/freight elevator to the VIP entrance, which also serves as the animal entrance. Every year the Met auditions animals for the season, which often calls for horses, dogs and donkeys. Our guide told us a hilarious story about a dog (борзая - a Russian wolfhound!) named Pasha who howled trying to sing a duet with Renée Fleming during a production of Manon and created a media sensation. Fleming was initially furious, but later recovered her sense of humor and even gave her blessing to a children’s book based on this incident.

Next to the beastly entrance and a hallway with an “easy-clean”, non-slip red floor, is a nondescript green door with paper sign taped to it: Richard Wagner. It turned out to be the name of one of the stage managers, whose office was behind that green door. Hillary said that a number of people working at the Met have “coincidental” names. It reminded me of something Maurice Béjart wrote in his memoir: once he just had to hire a ballerina by the name of Schubert-Wagner.

Backstage space is at a premium and decidedly unglamorous. If the auditorium is deep red and has no right angles, backstage is mostly gray and brown and has only right angles. In one such corner, a mirror is installed to keep the armies of extras from skewering each other with their swords and spears when they approach the corner from different directions.

Rehearsal rooms are spacious, windowless, drab, but have sprung floors, veneer-covered walls, and wall mirrors, – and not much air. I noticed large fans in the corners of one rehearsal room, which probably whip up a great deal of dust, which is everywhere.

Met Opera with the poster for Hansel and Gretel, 2014.
Chagall murals on the left and right remain covered on Sunday.

The Met of the Zeffirelli era stores only one week’s worth of sets on site and the rest are kept in warehouses across the river. The sets are like gigantic jigsaw puzzles assembled from many pieces, each of which has to fit into a truck. Each piece is labeled ("Big Rock, Aida, Part No. X"), but assembling them is still a daunting task. The size and complexity of the workshops where the sets and electrical machinery are made are staggering. What is equally amazing is that singers perform right next door to this dusty, dirty, and noisy menagerie and appear to be almost insignificant in comparison. 

We were lucky to witness how the sets for Aida were dismantled with the help of the freight lift, a spacious platform pushed by an enormous piston. The testosterone level backstage is high: the Met stagehands are burly men, many of whom follow in the professional footsteps of their older relatives and form a tight-knit guild. Majority of the Met employees are union workers and the unions occasionally clash with the administration. 

Lining the hallways are covered racks with costumes, organized and labeled by the opera and gender. As far as I could tell, costumes are made of excellent, heavy fabrics and the quality of the construction and workmanship is superb. Each costume is made in four sizes and labeled on the inside with the opera, act, and performer. Only hook and eye closures are used. Zippers are never used, because it is impossible to repair them quickly (the Royal Opera House is more adventurous: in their recent production of I due Foscari, the robes of the Venetian councilmen had zippers). Costumes for the stars are sometimes made without patterns, because the wardrobe department knows their measurements so well. Wigs are made only of human hair and each wig takes about forty hours to construct. With the introduction of the HD broadcasts, the expectations for the details of wardrobe and makeup have increased dramatically and sometimes require last-minute changes and fixes to make the visuals suitable for the relentless close-ups.

Finally we got to visit the dressing rooms. Currently, all dressing rooms are the same size and are similarly furnished, but traditionally the soprano in the lead part gets the room closest to the stage, the next room goes to the mezzo, and so on. The dressing rooms at the Met are very modest and are furnished with a makeup table and mirror, a full-length mirror, settee, a piano (Yamaha), and black blinds on the windows. I was told that in the opera world this is relative luxury.

My general impression was that the theater is a place of insane complexity, with a million moving parts that need to fit together just right and at the right moment. The mere fact that theater productions work more often than not is a miracle by itself. It is also a seductive place, which can be irresistible to some people who fall under its spell and want to become a part of it. Fortunately, I am not one of them, but with much appreciation for the gigantic mechanism or organism living backstage, I am always eager to admire the magnificent illusions that it produces.