From 2007:
Now that I’ve spent four years on the aisle as a theater critic, attending two or three performances each week in houses that rarely hold more than a thousand or so people, I find the monstrous scale of the Met to be even more problematic than I did when I was a working critic of music and dance. No doubt that’s one of the reasons why I no longer go there very often. For me, opera is drama or it’s nothing. Its purely musical values can be experienced just as well at home. Yes, I’ve seen some Met productions that made dramatic sense. John Dexter’s Dialogues of the Carmelites, Mark Lamos’ Wozzeck, and Elijah Moshinsky’s Queen of Spades all rank high on my list of unforgettable nights at the theater. But they’re exceptions to a rule that I find increasingly antipathetical….
Read the whole thing here.