Opera doesn’t enjoy the kind of broad popular appeal it did 50-odd years ago when New York’s Metropolitan Opera opened its new house in Lincoln Center. But even if you don’t know the difference between Rigoletto and rigatoni, make time for The Opera House.

Susan Froemke’s 110-minute documentary, which premiered on May 28 as part of PBS’ long-running Great Performances series and is now available for streaming, is framed around the development of the Met’s current home, open since September 16, 1966: Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts. For more than 80 years prior, the Met operated from a theater at 1411 Broadway, which was razed in 1967 and replaced with a 40-story office tower. Using interviews with longtime Met employees and performers—including soprano Leontyne Price, who opened the new Met in 1966 and is still incandescent in her early 90s—and exceptional archival photography and footage from inside the original Met house, Froemke potently recreates the one-time focal point of New York’s social set and working classes alike, then takes us to the nerve-wracking opening night of the current Met. It’s a rousing argument for opera.

But more than just a call to support your local soprano, The Opera House is an incisive discussion of postwar urbanism, of which the Met was the centerpiece for the Lincoln Center complex.

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