A Night at the Symphony… and the Theater!

                I have a confession to make: I like classical music.  I’ve only ever confessed that to my parents and one friend.  I’m not embarrassed about it, it just doesn’t usually come up.  I’m even a member of the Triangle’s classical music station.

                So, when I saw that the PlayMakers Repertory Company was teaming up with the North Carolina Symphony for a production of Amadeus, I was excited.  When I saw that they got Michael Urie to play the title role, I was beyond stoked.

                So, my seat was in the row GG, the very last row of the orchestra, but it was still a great seat.  It was in the concert hall at the Progress Energy Center for the Performing Arts in downtown Raleigh.  I’ve never been in the concert hall before – it was very nice: not too big, not too small, with a very intimate feel.  The only thing that was strange about seeing a theater piece in a concert hall was the acoustics.  While the orchestra sounding AH-mazing, listening to dialogue in the concert hall took a little getting used to.  I didn’t particularly mind, though.

                Anyway, the show was fabulous!  I loved every minute of it.  I thought that the role of Salieri exquisitely crafted, and that Michael Urie was phenomenal as Mozart.  It was a really cool experience to see a theater piece performed on the same stage as a symphony orchestra.  It worked really well, and the orchestra sounded amazing.  I was impressed at how well the two elements (the play and the orchestra) were woven together to create one seamless evening of remarkable entertainment.  There was a Q&A with some of the folks from the show after the performance, which was way fun.  I learned that the previous night was the first and only time that they did an entire run-through without stopping with all of the elements of the show present (the singers, the actors, and the orchestra).  It was so phenomenal that my jaw literally dropped when they told me that!

                I was even more pleased to see that the audience wasn’t populated solely by older folks, and that I wasn’t the only young adult in the audience.  Sure, all the young people were in the cheap seats with me, and one or two of them were wearing jeans (which were more than compensated for by the number of folks in suits!), but we were there!  I’ve never been to a symphony performance before (unless you’re counting Peter and the Wolf as a child), but I was worried that the young adult crowd was going to skip out on this wonderful theatrical opportunity because they were worried that the symphony would be boring.  I was pleasantly surprised.  Sure, most of the people there were the folks I had expected to see, but I was proud of the young adults of the Triangle for showing up for great art.