House style. (Coda).(opera houses)(Brief Article)

One evening last year, holding a ticket for New York City Opera's compelling production of Handel's Acis and Galatea, I walked from a cafe opposite Lincoln Center to the theater in a near-perfect storm. The rain soaked my shoes, and the ferocious winds turned my legs to rubber. The door to the State Theater never looked better. "Oh, happy we," Handel's lovers later sang. They spoke for us all.

Opera houses, in fair weather as well as foul, beckon us. Their managers know we spend some of our most blissful hours therein, and they reinforce the attachments we form. The Metropolitan sponsors backstage tours, open rehearsals, special events and (paradox noted) radio broadcasts. It sells logo-souvenirs (aprons, coffee mugs, T-shirts) and, more important, creates social spaces that bind audience and house, such as the Belmont Room, for Guild members. Audiences themselves also personalize the house. Standing Room at the Old Met was a gathering place for gay men; now, having made appointments on the internet's opera-list, operagoers gay and straight meet during intermissions at the so-called Millo Pole to debate singers and productions. (Named for Aprile Millo, the Pole is a column near the elevator bank, orchestra level, where the soprano's fans used to congregate in the 1980s to compare notes on her performances.)

Architect Cesar Pelli, who conceived Miami's new performing arts center, opening in 2004, contends that market conditions have made the needs of audiences, rather than of performers, the sine qua non of theater construction. Neither architects nor general directors, nor operagoers themselves, however, can say how or why we develop an attachment to a house. One suspects the reasons may include what happens offstage as well as on--among other things, the convenience of parking, the location and hours of the bar and--why not?--the number and proximity of bathrooms.

Some houses prompt an instant affection. Santa Fe's alfresco theater, carved out of the foothills of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, offers incomparable sidelong views of New Mexico's sunsets, unpredictable weather and rugged terrain; the natural scenery enriches the pleasure of the performances. North of Santa Fe lies the granite-faced Central City (Colorado) Opera House. Renovated and reopened in 1932, in a now-defunct gold-mining town where operagoers rub elbows with casino hounds, this charming jewel-box theater takes one's breath away, literally, at 8,500 feet.

Like the U.S.'s Santa Fe and Central City, England's Glyndebourne and Garsington lie off the beaten path, meaning that London visitors can spend the better part of the day traveling there. So much the better. ...