OPENING NIGHT April 13, PBS, 10 p.m. E.S.T.
The San Francisco Opera's new production of Amilcare Ponchielli's sprawling, lurid La Gioconda last September was a vast undertaking, and PBS station KCET had the wit to record the preparations in a funny, breezy documentary, Opening NightÂThe Making of an Opera. The camera roams in wig shops and rehearsal rooms, where Baritone Norman Mittelman after fluffing a line complains that the composer wrote it wrong. At the shaky dress rehearsal Kurt Herbert Adler, 75, the company's director, notes, at that late hour, that the chorus...
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