Productions by the Met will be simulcast in this area and elsewhere, and they will be in high-definition.
Somewhere in the maze of sneaker shops and bath-soap stores, there are going to be operas. Grand ones.
The Neshaminy Mall - in a part of Bucks County that's more about suburban sprawl than the artsy, pastoral idylls of points north - is one of two places where the Metropolitan Opera will make its high-definition simulcast debut in the area at 1:30 p.m. Saturday.
You can just imagine the disparity between the fur-coat-and-tiara crowd and the mall's piped-in hard-rock renditions of "Silver Bells." Except that most opera people don't dress that way anymore, and the debut presentation is a condensed version of Mozart's The Magic Flute specifically geared to families.
Yet it's hard to predict what this high-tech, hybrid experience will look and feel like.
Met productions have appeared often on small-screen PBS telecasts, but not on the big screen. Do you buy tickets in advance? Can you eat popcorn while the fat lady sings?
What elements of the opera will be underscored or minimized by the medium? Nobody can say.
The simulcast is part of a series that will also include Bellini's I Puritani starring Anna Netrebko on Jan.
6, the new Tan Dun opera The First Emperor on Jan. 13, Tchaikovsky's Eugene Onegin on Feb. 24, The Barber of Seville on March 24, and Puccini's Il Trittico on April 28 - all Saturday matinee performances.
Amid the holiday movie crush, The Magic Flute is being carried by 46 theaters around the country, the AMC Neshaminy 24 being the closest to Philadelphia - off Route 1 north of the Pennsylvania Turnpike. There's also the Regal Warrington Crossing 22 in Warrington, Bucks County.
The number of theaters will increase to 87 for I Puritani, and will include Philadelphia's Riverview Plaza on Columbus Boulevard, the Brandywine Town Center 16 in Wilmington, and the King of Prussia 15 Imax in King of Prussia.
Tickets are $18 - high for movies, very low for operas. Their demand will depend on unpredictable combinations of variables, from the number of available seats to the element of opera starvation in any given community - not to mention the number of non-opera fans dropping in to see what it's like.
Traditionally, movie-theater simulcasts, which in the National CineMedia chain occur between 15 and 20 times a year, do well with passionate niche audiences, whether for Midwest marching-band competitions or concerts by the rock group Phish.
In Phoenix, where the time change translates into less-than-convenient late-morning curtain times, the Magic Flute simulcast was sold out the week before Christmas. (Both local showings were sold out as of yesterday.)
The theater at the Neshaminy 24 is medium-size at 200 seats, and part of a multiplex where, once in the door, opera fans won't feel as if they're slumming.
The look of the place is state-of-the-art, with a concession stand dramatically designed in 1930s European art deco. The theater size is likely to be an attraction: Many opera fans believe that the 3,900-seat Met is too large for much of the repertoire it presents.
Sound will be Surround and camera angles won't be lacking.
Mark Schubin, an engineer in charge of the Met's media department, says there may be as many as 12 cameras in the opera house, and that he's experimenting with aerial shots and a camera track going over the heads of the musicians in the orchestra pit. "In the past, it wasn't possible to translate the theater environment from the opera house to the cinema, but with HD, it's possible to get closer," he said.
Long shots once lacked definition and depth of field.
"Now, there are theories put out that on HDTV you'll never need a close-up because you can show a broader range of information," Schubin said.
Since opera is about stars, close-ups will of course be used - and one surprise may be how good the singers (who are loved more for their voices than faces) look in them: "We have lots of control over the camera. We have some 2,000 controls.
.. that determine how crisp the image looks.
And we can make overall images in which the skin looks softer."
The whole package is beamed to a satellite and down to theaters with special dishes, which is why some of the locations are so idiosyncratic. The National CineMedia side seems to be old hands at this; it's the international aspects of simulcast that are tricky.
"We are still sorting out software kinks with Canada and a challenging equipment compatibility issue in the U.K.," press director Sommer Hixon said on Saturday.
"We have consultants from the equipment manufacturers now working with us."
Even so, 3-D opera simulcasts can't be far way. Schubin reports there are impressive experiments in that direction, with and without audience glasses, that could come to fruition in three to five years.
As bold as the venture seems, the Met's new general manager, Peter Gelb, insists that it's remarkably low-risk: The multiplexes themselves don't have a high overhead and need free up only one theater on a Saturday afternoon. Also, any given simulcast will be followed by a PBS telecast some while later, with possible DVD release to follow.
The bigger questions, though, is how the perception of operatic art will be changed by the new medium.
Where digital recordings created careers for singers with less-aggressive vibratos, the more diffuse Surround Sound could reverse that trend - or take it further. How will notoriously fussy opera connoisseurs take to sound levels they can't adjust? Illusions cast by some productions onstage may show their seams on the large screen.
The Magic Flute will be a particularly telling case in point: The mask-and-puppet-based imagery of director-designer Julie Taymor counts on its power of suggestion for viewers to complete the picture in their minds. What happens if that suggestibility becomes literalized by the screen?
The truly unknown part is the dividends from the medium.
There may be many, so many that if the price, convenience and experience equation keeps audiences closer to home, the Met could be creating its own monster.
For more information, go to .
The theater phone numbers are 215-722-4262 (AMC Neshaminy) and 215-918-1660 (Regal Warrington); both bring recordings.
As of yesterday, both local showings were sold out.
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