...that the Film Festival came to a rollicking close over the weekend and I still haven't posted about it! I will, eventually.

However, for now, what I will post about is this:



I saw Doctor Atomic last night! Yay! It was an encore broadcast in HD at my local IMAX, and it came straight from the Metropolitan Opera in Manhattan. I bought the tickets about 2 or 3 months ago and had been waiting with bated breath ever since.

Here in Happyland, Ohio, most folks only care about college football. That's it. Forever into infinity. It makes a New Yorker feel absolutely flabbergasted. Why yes... there were twelve of us in attendance at Doctor Atomic last night. Twelve. (I'm not even going to discuss that sad fact right now.)

I will say that I have never seen anything like Doctor Atomic before. (Just FYI, it is a modern opera about Dr. Oppenheimer and the creation of the first atomic bomb out in Los Alamos, New Mexico in the mid-1940s.) It is 3 1/2 hours of lush, musical dissonance, plus poetry, science, math, philosphy -- all of it sung, mind you.

One thing about the Met production, though, even while I did find the sets a bit breathtaking, I think the first perfomances of the opera (it premiered in 2005) probably had better sets. Or sets that suited the piece better, I should say. Below are random photos from non-Met performances of Doctor Atomic:






Actually, that one right up above looks like it is indeed from the Met version.

Regardless, you can see that it is quite a modern opera.

Now, I must get moving around here. I am off to a wine tasting for this year's Beaujolais Nouveau!! Yay! You know what that means: Christmas is just around the corner!! Okay. See you tomorrow, gang, and in the meantime, thanks for visiting!