Column: For Lyric Opera audiences, a needless new dilemma: What to do when nature calls — and there’s no intermission?
On May 19, Lyric Opera of Chicago and the Joffrey Ballet held a justly jubilant joint press conference heralding their return to live performance. This was a morning to celebrate at the end of a crisis: opera and ballet of the highest international level was coming back full throttle in the fall. The Lyric even had beautiful new seats to showcase. What a morning!
But there was also an announcement of a curious wrinkle in the expansive new season at Lyric: all of the fall operas were to be recast as one-act experiences, performed without intermission. To achieve this goal, Lyric said, it even planned to make some artistic compromises and reduce the running times so that no opera would run more than two and a half hours.
Two and a half hours?
My mailbox immediately filled up with one burning question from Chicago’s opera fans: When do I pee?
In Lyric’s collective mind, the answer to that question seemed to be pretty much whenever you need to go, since the company planned to reduce its historically draconian restrictions on entry and exit from the auditorium during the performance. But to many of my readers, that policy seemed to mean risking missing some of the precious notes emanating from, say, the mouth of the Italian baritone Luca Salsi in Giuseppe Verdi’s “Macbeth,” even as he made his Lyric Opera debut.
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Not an appetizing prospect, they wrote, en masse. Then again, nor was holding it in for two and half hours.
So I asked Lyric: Are you really getting rid of intermissions, one of the more treasured rituals in the world of opera-going?
“There’s no need for anyone to worry,” said the spokesperson Holly Gilson. “Patrons who want to exit to use the facilities can easily do so and also easily rejoin the performance. We’re thinking through all of this and designing our plans so that no one needs to feel concerned. The shorter running times bring operatic performances in line with the running times of feature films, which we hope many will find even more appealing than a production with one or two 30-minute intermissions.”
I beg to differ and, based on my mailbox, so do many Lyric subscribers.
In fact, this sounds like a policy developed during the darker days of the pandemic, perhaps coming from one of those well-intentioned surveys that big arts organizations sent out asking their audience what worried them about returning to a theater or auditorium. No doubt some responders expressed worry about standing in a long line for the bathroom, or mingling at bars in the lobby. At the time, those were reasonable concerns.
The problem is that the surveys were filled out before the vast majority of the Lyric audience found itself in the glorious state of being fully vaccinated against COVID-19 and city, state and federal officials started loosening restrictions to the point where the city gave permission to the outdoor bacchanal known as Lollapalooza.
And if the theater is at full capacity, which it surely will be by then, there seems little logic in worrying about the lobby bars or the bathrooms. To my mind, it makes far more sense to restrict attendance to the fully vaccinated than to tell people they cannot enjoy their customary intermission and all of the relief it represents.
On a deeper level (if you can go any deeper than bathroom breaks), this is an example of a well-meaning policy that has become outdated very fast and now needs to be nixed before a note is sung on Wacker Drive. There is no good reason to trim Verdi, for goodness sake, anymore than there is a need to induce the anxiety in audience members rushing to the bathroom to try and avoid missing some of the opera, and maybe falling over themselves in the return process. And what about the disruption when they all try and come back in the dark? Will the ushers all create a secondary performance looking like synchronous fireflies?
And what about the gainful employment of all those bartenders? And the revenue that Lyric badly needs?
In the words of “King Lear”: “Oh, that way madness lies.”
Lyric did say that the policy was for fall only and that the company was “learning as we go.”
So let’s all learn together. There is a curious reluctance among Chicago-area arts organizations to embrace the benefits of the vaccine for their operations, even though the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has said that the risk to vaccinated persons is mild enough to not even necessitate masks in most indoor settings (Lyric hasn’t yet said what its mask policy will be, but requiring them makes more sense than banning intermissions.)
The Lyric audience is a smart crew that follows scientific leadership. I’ll wager that near 100% of them will be vaccinated by September and if Lyric were to ask its patrons now, as distinct from many weeks ago, they’d say they are just fine getting a drink or going to the bathroom. If they weren’t, or they had other health worries, they’d be availing themselves of the fine idea to offer livestreams for those who would rather be home.
After all, standing in the spacious lobby of the Civic Opera House is no different from visiting any of the bars or restaurants in the city, most of which are rocking and rolling now, and surely all of which will be going full tilt by the fall.
So cancel the trims and pauses and, this fall, bring back operatic intermissions, say I.
Vaccines protect us.
Let the people pee without missing a note.
Chris Jones is a Tribune critic.
