Here is what the Met Live in HD series gets right: you do not need a train ticket to Lincoln Center to sit in front of one of the world’s great opera companies. On Saturday, October 3, UPAC in Kingston brings the Metropolitan Opera’s season opener — Mozart’s Così fan tutte — live to the Hudson Valley via satellite broadcast, starting at 1:00 PM.
About the Production
Director Phelim McDermott sets Mozart’s comedy of fickle young love at a 1950s Coney Island boardwalk amusement park, and the staging commits fully. The Metropolitan Opera assembled actual sideshow performers — strongmen, sword swallowers, fire eaters, a contortionist — and this production marks the company’s first-ever onstage live Burmese python. It is inventive work on an outsized scale, co-produced with the English National Opera in collaboration with theater company Improbable.
The cast: soprano Federica Lombardi as Fiordiligi, mezzo-soprano Samantha Hankey as Dorabella, tenor Duke Kim as Ferrando, and baritone Andrey Zhilikhovsky as Guglielmo. Bass-baritone Gerald Finley plays the scheming Don Alfonso, with soprano Ana María Martínez as the maid Despina. Nimrod David Pfeffer conducts.
Block off your Saturday — the full performance including interval runs close to four hours. A pre-opera talk starts 30 minutes before curtain, and it is worth arriving early for if you want context going in. This is the opening broadcast of the Met Live in HD’s 20th anniversary season, a series that transmits to more than 2,200 cinemas across 70-plus countries. Getting to see it in a 1,500-seat Hudson Valley theater rather than a multiplex is genuinely the better call.
About UPAC
UPAC (Ulster Performing Arts Center) sits at 601 Broadway in Kingston — a 1,500-seat theater operated by Bardavon. It is a proper room: the kind of house where a live HD simulcast from the Met stage feels like a real event, not a workaround. Kingston is a Hudson Valley destination worth a few extra hours if you are making the drive from elsewhere in the region.
Tickets
Tickets are available through Get Tickets. The UPAC box office is at 601 Broadway, Kingston; call (845) 339-6088, Tuesday through Friday, 10 AM to 4 PM.