More Reasons to Love Living Here

...include stumbling upon little mixed-bag productions of Boheme, staged with milk crates, in neighborhood parks. To remove this from the abstract, I am speaking of a production by, hm, the Moose Hall Theatre Co. under the auspices of the Inwood Shakespeare Festival. Obviously opera's not a rarity here, even in the summer, but you have to understand, living in Inwood is like living in a nice little town outside of NYC (Radio City, you might say, were you a stewardess in a musical) and the fact that opera pops up even here is just one more thing to make one insufferable about this city. Just imagine, one might say, as one's friends got out socks full of horse manure, we're practically bursting with artistic expression here, yesirree. The performance was accompanied on synthesizer, and amplified which of course makes it difficult to tell high quality vocalism from shinola, but there in the shadow of the bridge on a humid evening near the solstice, it was just what the doctor ordered. In any case some artful vocalizing was certainly produced by Eleni Calenos, the evening's Mimi, and to my ear best of all, Matthew Singer, the Marcello, who appeared to be a barihunk of the bearihunk subspecies. They're doing it again Saturday, so if you're not afraid of the upper reaches of the 1 train and what I'm describing sounds fun rather than shoddy, c'mon up!