OPERA
WEDNESDAY - SATURDAY, JULY 17 - 20, 2019
7:00 PM

Mozart: The Magic Flute
Mostly Mozart Festival
David H. Koch Theater
20 Lincoln Center Plaza, Upper West Side, Manhattan

$55-$175
http://www.lincolncenter.org/mostly-mozart-festival/show/the-magic-flute-2

Mainstream opera in New York is a pretty sorry affair. An audience of brain-dead reactionaries has assumed control of it, making it impossible to mount productions that appeal to the general intelligent audience that frequents other performing art forms. This brain-dead audience denies that opera is theater -- indeed, it denies that opera is a living form. It rejects productions that engage with and interrogate classic works -- the kind of thing that's SOP in current classic theater productions, in the absence of which people wouldn't even bother going -- and instead demands calcified thought-free retreads of its "beloved" melodramas of victimization of women. Only happy when its intelligence is being insulted (or, more accurately, its complacency and empty-headed love of shallow luxury is being indulged), this audience haughtily sniffs at "eurotrash" and "regie" whenever faced with an opera production that actually addresses the (often problematic) content of the classic work being presented. So when one of the summer festivals sneaks in a current European production of a classic opera -- the kind of thing the mainstream New York audience won't let our hometown opera house put on -- it's both a breath of fresh air and a very big deal. Has the work of the leading opera director Barrie (he misspells his first name!) Kosky ever been presented in New York? Well, here's his Komische Oper Berlin take on Mozart's high-and-low extravaganzaThe Magic Flute, produced along with a British theater company specializing in integrating animation with live action and presented as a Weimar-era movie. This promises to be a superb entertainment as well as a chance to hear some of the best music every written by a European (another of those very late Mozart pieces that make you suspect he died just when he was getting reallygood). No one with a brain should miss this.

MAKE A NIGHT OF IT: Bar Boulud's across-Broadway-from-Lincoln-Center location has probably stopped people from considering it what it is: one of the finest bistros in New York, worth visiting even if you're not going to Lincoln Center.