Stephanie Blythe as Baba the Turk in Stravinksky’s THE RAKE’S PROGRESS at the Met (photo by Marty Sohl/Metropolitan Opera)
The Metropolitan Opera
30 Lincoln Center Plaza
Columbus Ave. at 63rd St.
May 4-9, $30-$360
212-362-6000
www.metopera.org
The Metropolitan Opera’s 2014-15 season is ending this week, but it’s a great time to begin a lifelong love of the art form, because May features three audience pleasers ideal for first-time operagoers: Lehár’s lighthearted operetta romp The Merry Widow (May 7, 7:30), with art nouveau staging by Broadway director and choreographer Susan Stroman (The Producers, The Scottsboro Boys), boasting costumes by six-time Tony winner William Ivey Long; Stravinsky’s only full-length opera, The Rake’s Progress (May 4, 7:30; May 9, 1:00), a twentieth-century English-language modernist classic (W. H. Auden and Chester Kallman wrote the libretto) with a brand-new staging that opened two weeks ago, conducted by James Levine and with set design by Peter J. Davidson; and Sir David McVicar’s fresh and inventive version of the classic double bill Cav/Pag (May 5 & 8, 7:30), aka the old warhorse of the opera stage, Cavalleria Rusticana/Pagliacci, conducted by Fabio Luisi. If your ideas about opera come mainly from Warner Bros. Bugs Bunny cartoons, the Met’s contemporary take on these classics may open your eyes. Leoncavallo’s sad clown is still sad, but now I Pagliacci’s commedia dell’arte company in Calabria has become a vaudeville troupe at a 1948 truck stop in Sicily, while Cavalleria is in the same place — but fifty years earlier. Stroman’s widow (Susan Graham) romps through Maxim’s in Paris, and Stravinsky’s Nick Shadow (Gerald Finley) is sleek and sinister in a corporate setting, complete with a giant suspended shark that manages to evoke both Damien Hirst’s work and the nearby American Museum of Natural History. These three crowd pleasers may be just what’s needed to win over even the most dubious “Kill the Wabbit!” fan.