Your wish is my command: Lincoln Center Ballet

I’ve always wanted to go to the Lincoln Center. And I’ve always wanted to watch a professional ballet performance in NYC. And I’ve always wanted to sit in theatre box seats.

Well, all three wishes were granted last night. (Does this mean I'm out of wishes?)

Philip and I attended an American Ballet Theatre performance of “The Bright Stream” at the Lincoln Center’s Metropolitan Opera House. If we had waited just two more nights, I could’ve watched Julie Kent on stage - that would’ve been an experience! (Julie Kent is the principal dancer at the American Ballet Company in one of my favorite movies, Center Stage.)

We started in balcony box seats, but shortly after the show started, we moved to regular balcony seats. When they said box seats had “partial views,” I didn’t realize it meant “you’ll only see half the stage.” (I’ve had partial view theatre seats before, so I had an idea of what to expect. This theatre was nothing like what I had previous experienced before.) Anyhow, I didn’t feel so bad changing seats because half the balcony boxes emptied out by the time intermission came around.

Staggered lights

The Metropolitan Opera House was grandiose. It looked like what you would expect an opera house to look like based on what you see on TV and in the movies. The house lights were staggered, dangling at different heights, until they turned off...at which point they were pulled all the way up to the ceiling.

The ballet was fun, a comedy about mistaken identity (a male ballet dancer was on pointe...hehe), but I wish we could have sat closer. Musicals and plays are in theatres that are much smaller, and I can see the facial expressions of the actors. The opera house was so large that I had to strain my eyes to try to catch the dancers’ facial expressions...and I never did. In fact, I tried so hard to see their facial expressions that my eyes hurt by the time we left.

Nevertheless, I thought the Lincoln Center and the Metropolitan Opera House were worth the price of admission. The ballet was fun, but I think I would have appreciated it more if I had sat closer to the stage. And the box seats? Well, it’s fun to say I sat there, but I’d never buy them again.