![]() ![]() The New York Times critic strenuously praised just about everything in the opera while artfully avoiding any explicit reference to the words. In New York magazine we are told the libretto mixes “leaden lingo” and “opaque poetry,” but somehow that doesn’t matter because the music and sets are so good. Just for being there at what they’ve been told is such an important artistic event. ![]() Which reminded me of a feeling I often have at overhyped Broadway dramas about “important” subjects: The applause you hear at the end is the audience applauding itself. And nobody wanted to be considered stupid. Turns out there was another element: In the Andersen version, everyone was told ahead of time that the emperor’s new costume was so radical and different that stupid people wouldn’t even be able to see it. Well, I said, you know, conformity, peer pressure, fear of punishment, right? She’d always wondered, she said, why everyone in the fable went along with the gag and no one but the little boy spoke up and said the emperor was naked. In any case, the next evening as I was talking about my “Emperor’s New Clothes” feeling, Julia Sheehan told me she’d recently reread the original Hans Christian Andersen fable and found an aspect of it that she (and I) had forgotten. ![]()
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