u/nefariousplotz

Everybody should try the opera once, for the same reason they should try Ethiopian food or watch a Hitchcock movie or read some poetry or see the ocean. And if you've never been, you should consider going while there's a 75% discount.

If you just want cheap tickets, visit the Canadian Opera Company's website, pick the Tuesday or Thursday performance, and enter promo code TOXICBUTMAKEITOPERA. There are $25 tickets available in rings 4 and 5, and $50/$75 tickets available in the orchestra section and ring 3. (In all cases, this is about a 75% discount off full price.)

If you need more convincing...

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What is opera?
Opera is extremely emotional performance. The emotions are arguably even more important than the singing. Opera is where you go to see portraits of joy and sadness, love and betrayal, aspiration and devastation: to taste these emotions without fucking up your personal life.

Of course, there is also singing, and it's a kind of singing that may make you wonder about the limits of the human body. Someone can stand on a stage and not just sing beautifully, but sing clearly enough to carry over the sound of a 50-member orchestra, all the way to the back of the fourth balcony, without any amplification. Incredible.

More generally, westerners have been enjoying opera for 250+ years, and they weren't wrong. The things that drew people to opera in 1920 are still present today, and they might grip you, too.

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Why THIS opera?
The 75% discount is actually for two short operas, presented as a single performance:

• "Bluebeard's Castle", an adaptation of a French folk story about a wealthy man with a sinister reputation, and what becomes of his new bride.
• "Erwartung", an original story about a frightened woman searching for her lover in a forest.

The whole performance takes about two hours, including a 30-minute intermission. And both of these stories are quite small, with only three named characters between them. (Which also makes them easy to follow.)

I will warn you: "Erwartung" is weird. Like, weird weird. It's got weird music, the story is weird, the staging is weird, it's just weird man. It's also about half an hour long. You'll live.

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I don't speak Hungarian
Both operas are presented with English surtitles. Reading surtitles can be a bit of a drag, but it's opera, not stand-up comedy. The language often moves fairly slowly, and you don't need to understand every single word in order to follow the story.

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I don't own any fancy clothes
There is no dress code. About 10-15% of the audience will be wearing jeans. There will be hoodies, and t-shirts, and probably a couple of dads in seasonally inappropriate shorts.

Some people do dress up: you may see some people in gowns and tailored suits, and if you want to do the same, you won't feel out-of-place. But you don't have to.