Original image by There Stands the Glass.
I didn’t know what to make of the lovely family seated near me in the cheap seats of Kansas City’s splashy opera house on Friday, May 7. After witnessing scenes of torture, attempted rape, murder and suicide in Giacomo Puccini’s provocatively melodramatic 1900 opera “Tosca,” two perfectly behaved little girls in matching dresses and their doting parents walked out of the Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts as if they’d just taken in a showing of Disney on Ice.
The Lyric Opera of Kansas City’s production rattled me. “Tosca” was the first professional opera I’d experienced in-person since 2019. As documented extensively at this site, I came to opera late in life. I immersed myself in the form during the pandemic. When I finish watching the Hungarian State Opera’s mesmerizing new four-hour rendering of Richard Wagner’s “Parsifal,” I’ll have taken in 303 online operas in the past two years.
The initiative altered my expectations. Having seen Luciano Pavarotti play the ill-fated painter Mario Cavaradossiin in two filmed productions of “Tosca,” my standards are now unreasonably high. Only Marina Costa-Jackson’s turn in the title role didn’t disappoint me last night. Other positives: the Kansas City Symphony was electrifying, the lighting was excellent and the informal banter among patrons in the peanut gallery was refreshing.