What first time viewings did you love in April?

Even though the Met has been doing these broadcasts to theaters for 10 or 11 years, My Lovely Wife and I have, over about the last 5 years, attended 3 or 4 a season. The tickets cost much more that a regular movie - about $26 per in our metro area. Most we have seen are very well done. Some, like Cendrillon, are, as you say, spectacular.

I have been an opera fan since 1977 when the Met broadcast its very first live TV performance on PBS. It was La Bohème. I was enjoying it enough, all right, until the second act that takes place in the Latin Quarter of Paris. The free-spirited Musetta enters singing her song (if you think you haven't heard it, the melody was used in the 1959 hit "Don't Your Know" sung by Della Reese). It was like evangelicals describe a conversion experience: you are suddenly struck by the spirit and your life is changed in an instant. I can tell you the exact moment in the song where it happened (check out the 4:10 mark in the second video below). Nothing like that has ever happened to me before or since. I have talked to people about how they became opera buffs and read other experiences and would like to issue this warning: La Bohème is the opera that more than any other has changed people into unbearable raving opera maniacs. Don't say you haven't been warned!