Good morning. It's Monday. We'll find out what drives the trucks on the stage in "Carmen" at the Metropolitan Opera. We'll also get details on subway service on the 1, 2 and 3 lines after the derailment last week on the Upper West Side.
Three pickup trucks and a tractor-trailer ride across the stage in the Metropolitan Opera's new modern-dress production of "Carmen." They are not traditional opera props — tables, chairs, chalices, swords, maybe a horse for "Aida" — and don't look under any of the hoods. Their engines have been taken out. You wouldn't want the cast and the chorus smelling exhaust fumes backstage as the trucks and a little red sports car wait to drive out from the wings. When they do, their wheels are spinning as the cast sings and dances in the semi and in the pickups — a 1980 Chevrolet, a 1978 Chevy and a Ford that Gabrielle Heerschap, the Met's associate technical director, said "might be from the '90s." The little red car is a Jaguar, for Don José, whose obsession with Carmen becomes murderous. The Met has had vehicles on its stage before, in recent versions of "Lucia di Lammermoor" and "Rigoletto," among others. But those vehicles mostly stayed in fixed positions. Michael Levine, the set designer of "Carmen," wanted the vehicles to move and said he had "naïvely" assumed they could be outfitted with small electric engines for their trips back and forth across the stage. Instead, the Met opted to drive them with a computer-controlled system of wires — unseen, under the stage. The vehicles in "Carmen" are connected to the wires by posts known in Met stage terminology as "knives." So the rubber never meets the stage in "Carmen." The tires on the tractor-trailer are not even made of rubber. The ones on the pickup trucks are, but they are filled with foam, not air, and do not spin. The hubcaps do, because they have been separated from the tires. Not only were the trucks supposed to move, but they were to carry cast members — a dozen or so in the back of each pickup. "This is a ton of weight," Heerschap said. She meant that literally, give or take a hundred pounds or so. "We didn't know for sure if we could fit that many people until we tried it onstage," Levine said. For the semi, there is one cab and two trailers. The cab and one trailer are upright in one act. Later, after a scene change, the cab and the other trailer are seen lying on their sides. According to Heerschap, it takes stagehands about five minutes when the curtain is down to move the upright trailer offstage, uncouple it from the cab, flip the cab onto the floor and position it in front of the second trailer. Both trailers were made in the Met's workshop. Carpenters put a curtain on one side and footlights on the floor in the upright one.
"It's like a little stage unto itself, its own little vaudeville stage," complete with a secret door and a hidden staircase, Levine said. The dancers who are in the trailer at the beginning of one act need a way out when choristers arrive to take their places. As for the pickup trucks, he wanted a weatherworn appearance. "I wanted them all to have a slightly vintage quality, so they looked like trucks that had been on the road for a long time," Levine said. "Older and more bashed up." A prop shop did the opposite of the usual auto body magic. Also on Levine's orders, the pickups were given two-tone paint jobs. "I wanted a certain level of roughness but also a little warmth" in the color scheme, he said. "I wanted to feel like these were trucks you might see in a rougher, deserty place. I wanted a feeling."
Still no snowmen
It has now been almost 700 days since at least an inch of snow fell in Central Park in a single day. The National Weather Service said that only 0.2 inches of snow fell there over the weekend, in contrast to places in New Jersey and upstate New York where the first major storm of the winter brought a foot of snow, give or take an inch or so. The storm followed its predicted path and stayed north and west of New York City. A list of storm totals compiled by the Weather Service showed only two places in New York with accumulations of more than a foot. Both were in Orange County — Port Jervis, with 13.1 inches, and Unionville, with 12.4 inches. Leading the list in New Jersey were Blairstown and Wantage Township, in northern New Jersey, each with 11.5 inches.
In the city, the Sanitation Department said that every street was salted as Saturday gave way to Sunday. But the plows went unused. Only after two inches of snow have fallen does the Sanitation Department give the order to begin clearing the streets. Gov. Kathy Hochul said she was well aware that many people in New York City had hoped they would finally have the raw materials for snowmen over the weekend. "Lucky for them, or unfortunately for them, depending on your perspective," she said at a news briefing, "they are going to have to wait a little longer." There is precipitation in the forecast for tomorrow, but not much chance of breaking the no-snow streak. The prediction is for another rainy day, at least in the city, with flash flooding possible. WEATHER It's going to be a sunny day in the mid-40s, with temperatures dropping to the low 30s at night. ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKING In effect until Jan. 15 (Martin Luther King's Birthday). The latest New York news
We hope you've enjoyed this newsletter, which is made possible through subscriber support. Subscribe to The New York Times. Subway service is fully restored after a derailment
Service on the 1, 2 and 3 subway lines was fully restored on Sunday, more than 60 hours after a collision between two trains left 26 people injured, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority said. The collision, on Thursday afternoon, happened near West 96th Street in Manhattan. It involved a train carrying about 300 passengers and one that had gone out of service at 79th Street. M.T.A. crews began repairs soon after firefighters evacuated the passengers, but service disruptions continued into the weekend as the temperature dropped and snow flurries gave way to slushy rain. The transit agency and the National Transportation Safety Board are investigating the crash. Human error appears to have caused the collision, according to three transit officials with knowledge of the investigation, but it was not immediately clear who was at fault. The officials said that the crew on the out-of-service train kept moving forward slowly against a red light near 96th Street, where the train with the 300 passengers had a green light to go around it on the express track and then move back to the local track. The leader of one transit workers' union suggested that a decision by a supervisor had precipitated the crash. METROPOLITAN DIARY Reliable ride
Dear Diary: It was 1974. I was 25, and I was making my first business trip to New York with the president of the firm where I worked. It was a big deal in my embryonic career, and I chatted about it on the taxi ride to the office on John Street. The driver was a family man from Queens with daughters who were about my age. He asked when I was flying back. In a week, I told him. He offered to pick me up and take me back to Kennedy Airport. The client visit went well, and when it was time for me leave for the airport the president of the company said he would arrange a car service to take me there. "Oh, that won't be necessary," I said, explaining the arrangement I had with the cabdriver. Dismissing me as naïve, the company president instructed his secretary to call for a car. She returned a few minutes later looking perplexed. "There's a Mr. Papadopoulos in the lobby looking for Ms. Lacey to take her to the airport?" she said. I smiled and pretended not to notice the surprised look on the big man's face. "My driver will no doubt want to hear about my trip," I said, thanking the secretary as I threw my coat over one arm and grabbed my shiny new briefcase. "And I don't want to disappoint him." — Charlene Lacey Illustrated by Agnes Lee. Send submissions here and read more Metropolitan Diary here. Glad we could get together here. See you tomorrow. — J.B. P.S. Here's today's Mini Crossword and Spelling Bee. You can find all our puzzles here. Melissa Guerrero and Ed Shanahan contributed to New York Today. You can reach the team at nytoday@nytimes.com. Sign up here to get this newsletter in your inbox.
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N.Y. Today: How the Met Opera revved up “Carmen”
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