Two gentle people of the better sort were waiting for us at the opera. They had paid something like a firstborn for the privilege and I was not about to disappoint. I wore the gown normally reserved for Café Cleopatra, and the Standard Opera Companion wore nothing at all; just a litre of burning gasoline that had to be messily replenished every forty minutes. We didn’t expect to be upstaged by the show.

Ding! Ding! Was not a sound that I expected to ever hear, but it happened last week when we reached the bottom of the caviar bucket. Without any opera business on the horizon, daddy was forced to improvise, and so we went to the ballet.

The evening started with an explanation that the order of the pieces was changed so that the orchestra would only have to shuffle seats once. For Beethoven’s 1st Concerto, they were seated tightly around the piano, with its back to us, in the manner of an 18th century chamber concert, so that we might appreciate [...]

Stage design appears in the criminal code under “manslaughter – unusual,” which is a possible label for the season premiere of Opéra de Montréal’s La Bohème, a “lavish new production” that treats its talented cast with the thoughtfulness and dignity of a garden rake to the face, and succeeds largely in spite of itself. Only [...]