What price culture.

The Dayton Opera association puts on 4 shows a season; next season we get Le Nozze de Figaro (good), Tosca (less good; I've seen it five times already. Get a new workhorse.), Little Women (hah?), and Opera Goes to the Movies.

Now, I never get tired of Mozart, and I'm willing to put up with yet another staging of Tosca, even at $62 a ticket, if the rest of the season is worth it, but the other two items have me worried. This is the Little Women writeup in the newsletter:

The New York Times has hailed it as a "masterpiece", our third production is a stunning and moving adaptation of Louisa May Alcott's masterpiece novel, Mark Adamo's Little Women.

(Sic, sic, sic. Just wanted to emphasize that the mangled grammar is theirs, not mine.)

Premiered in 1998 at the Houston Grand Opera, Little Women is already being heralded as one of the most beloved American operas.

My conservative instincts are balking. I hate modern classical music with a passion; just about anything post Stravinsky makes my skin crawl. If that makes me a troglodyte, so be it.

Then we come to the item that makes me scowl: Opera Goes to the Movies. This is apparently the orchestra and a series of neophyte opera singers performing selections from operas featured in movies. I don't mind a revue, and the selections are potentially interesting, but for $62 I could rent all the movies involved and still have plenty left for a pizza. Deluxe, even. The hell of it is, if I balk at renewing because I'm tired of Tosca, suspicious of Little Women, and not interested in the free-floating ariafest, I lose my seat--and my seat is prime. So knowing my tendency to just not go if I think I'm not going to enjoy what's ahead of me, I'm potentially going to eat 3 of the 4 tickets. Gad.

[No, there's no point to this. Just pointless bitchery.]