His opera productions, though, tend to have more in common with Women on the Verge, feeling indecisive and even bored rather than confident. Much has been made at the Metropolitan Opera of Mr. Sher's Tony Award-winning gift for theatricality, but in opera, his theatrical instinct often feels a bit off, as though he doesn't quite get the art form.

There's a similar uncertainty about his production of Rossini's Le Comte Ory, which had its Met premiere last week. A gleeful farce about a young libertine who dresses his gang up as nuns to infiltrate the castle of a countess he wants to seduce, the opera should sparkle. But despite a starry, game central trio of singers--Juan Diego Florez (sounding a little thin), Diana Damrau (her voice increasingly rich) and Joyce DiDonato (dusky-toned and charismatic)--the Met's production, uninspiringly conducted by Maurizio Benini, never quite takes off.

Mr. Sher sets the opera in a theater within a theater, or more precisely on a generically rustic stage within a theater. The set is spare, dotted with the mystifying movable trees that the director has recycled from his production of The Barber of Seville and dominated by a looming, bland white back wall; on the other hand, the costumes (by Catherine Zuber) are extraordinary.

There is an actor playing a kind of 18th-century stage manager who bangs a big stick on the stage to start the show; the rest of the time he busies himself with the set elements. The characters on occasion toss him a prop that they're no longer using. He's there to be adorable, but the result is to wink at the opera rather than just performing it. At one point, old-fashioned wind and thunder machines conjure up Restoration dramaturgy, an effect at odds with the Met's stated desire not to present this opera as a "relic." Eighteenth-century theater artists didn't rely on those techniques because they thought they were cute; at the time, they were cutting-edge. In 2011, though, it's just another wink.

Of course, the production's hokey, meta-theatrical imagery is meant to tie in to the illusions perpetuated by Ory, the "theater" he's putting on. We get it. But in Mr. Sher's hands, it is not the kind of insight that brings us closer to the opera.

It's unclear why Mr. Sher has chosen to update the piece from the Middle Ages to the 1700s. There is certainly no need to hew to a composer's chosen period, but there should be a reason for a switch. Mr. Sher's move, though, is arbitrary, and, even worse, he loses the fact that the piece takes place during the Crusades.

This is a society whose men have been away for years dying in a distant conflict. The wartime setting permeates the piece; the engine of the plot is the knowledge that at any moment, the men will all be returning home from Jerusalem. Farce works when there is some sense of real danger, real stakes, underlying the frolic. The opera's gender-bending sex play takes on its urgency and humor, its almost anxious vivacity, because suffering and sadness are in the air.

The work's emotions are hilarious, but they're hilarious because they're sincere. The fake "siege" of the Countess' castle by Ory and his men is meaningful and weird and funny because it is a twisted parody of other, very real sieges. As in all jokes, the characters attempt to expiate deep fears by recasting those fears in an absurd context. For Mr. Sher, though, the opera is all about those spindly trees and some easy cross-dressing gags.

The operas of Rossini's period inhabit an odd middle ground between the utter stylization of the Baroque and Classical periods and the (relative) naturalism of later Verdi and Puccini. Because of that sensibility, so foreign from our own, these works are difficult to direct nowadays. Since we are lucky enough to have extraordinary singers for these operas, the Met is sensibly programming a lot of them. But the company's recent productions have been frustratingly resistant to taking these operas seriously, even when they are high-spirited or lighthearted. When the operas' subtle ironies are cloaked in far more blatant conceits, these productions become merely jokes about jokes, intermittently charming but exhibiting the opposite of the relevance and theatricality to which they so desperately aspire.

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So it was perhaps surprising to some that Mr. Levine didn't skip the run of Bedrich Smetana's The Bartered Bride at the Juilliard School from Feb. 15 to Feb. 20. But this was not just another conservatory production. It was, in a sense, Mr. Levine's baby: the inaugural offering of a new partnership between Juilliard and the Met's Lindemann Young Artist Development Program, a partnership that has the potential to transform the way young singers rise at the Met.

The new partnership, marked by a shiny "Met+Juilliard" logo, was announced in February 2008 but had been a priority of Mr. Levine's for years, even decades, before that. He founded the Met's young artist program in 1980 and has long advocated for a closer relationship with Juilliard, the kind of institutional partnership--bridging closely held fiefdoms--that can be excruciatingly difficult to make happen. That it happened at all is amazing, and it is a tribute to the size of the victory that Mr. Levine made a point of being on the podium.

When the partnership was first announced, Allan Kozinn wrote in The New York Times that it was "essentially an expansion of the Met's young artist program," which was renamed after a $10 million gift from George and Frayda Lindemann in 1998. The three-year program provides a stipend, coaching and some performance opportunities at the Met, usually in smaller roles.

The Lindemann program is a prestigious thing to have on one's résumé, but as the pace of the opera world quickens, the Met seems to want to give its most promising singers earlier experiences playing major roles in high-profile productions. As Met general manager Peter Gelb told The Times, "One of the shortcomings of our young artist program in the past has been that when our young singers do get onstage, it's typically in a smaller role. Getting a major role is rare. This will help give them that experience."

So while the content of the young artist program will remain largely similar--participants will now be able to attend some classes at Juilliard--the significance is in giving added prominence to both the program and the school, which, while only a few hundred yards from the Met, has sometimes seemed much further away in terms of getting its students onstage. It is another way of making the Lindemann program even more attractive to young talent. "We have global talent scouts looking for artists who should be on our stage," Mr. Gelb said, "and I think they should be looking for young singers who should be in this program as well."

The centerpiece of the new partnership will be an annual production, either fully staged or in a concert version, co-presented by the Met and Juilliard and conceived, at least some of the time, as a trial run for a later, larger-scale production at the Met itself. That is the plan for this year's Bartered Bride, a classic tale of a bumpy road to love in the Czech countryside and one of the most beloved of operatic comedies. Mr. Levine conducted a famous John Dexter production of the work at the Met in 1978, which he brought back to the company in 1996.

This "Met+Juilliard" production is by Stephen Wadsworth, who took over this season's new production of Boris Godunov when Peter Stein dropped out late in the process. As in Boris, there was a great deal going on in Bartered Bride, but little seemed to happen. Every person onstage, down to the last chorister, seemed to have been given a backstory, an action to perform, a person to converse with, but the result felt artificial. The production, updated from the 1860s to the 1930s (because of budget reasons, Mr. Wadsworth wrote in a program note), resembled several of the Juilliard productions I've attended in the past few years: well prepared but a little staid, nicely sung and attractively designed but somehow unexciting. Mr. Levine's conducting, similarly, was lacking not in polish but in fire.

The opera was performed in an English translation by the poet J.D. McClatchy, whose Magic Flute translation is sometimes performed by the Met and who recently published his versions of seven Mozart librettos. His work here, as in Mozart, tended toward the cutely, tediously self-regarding. And the bland choreography of Benjamin Millepied exemplified the Met's recent taste for boldface names over effective artistry (remember the Herzog/de Meuron/Prada Attila?).

But the reason for the Met/Juilliard partnership is the singers, and they were uniformly charming. The stars, soprano Layla Clair and tenor Paul Appleby, sang well, and Mr. Appleby got many opportunities to act barely contained excitement, which he clearly enjoys. (Both he and Ms. Clair did their bits of dancing with more character, style and flair than the too-smooth Juilliard dancers in the company.)

But the production's opening night was one of those cultural events whose significance goes far beyond what happens onstage. Who knows what the full artistic implications of the Met's partnership with Juilliard will be over the coming decades, but it's an institutional streamlining of a kind that happens only rarely at this level. And that is why Mr. Levine, even though he didn't feel hardy enough to make it to the stage for his bow, made very sure he was there.

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“I cannot wait to see Michelle Obama!” said the fit morning-talk-show host Kelly Ripa, adding that she was wearing fake eyelashes for the occasion. “I love her whole physicality—she’s so tall and statuesque and good-looking!”

Ms. Ripa was wearing a strapless navy Alberta Ferretti gown with a taut bodice. “I chose it because—I know this will sound silly—but I thought it made me look busty!” she said. Asked whether her bare arms were a sartorial tribute to the first lady, Ms. Ripa giggled. “Let me tell you about the arms,” she said. “It’s springtime, but it’s very cold tonight and it’s very hard finding anything with a sleeve. Trust me!”

The actress Lindsay Price arrived in a mermaid-style dress designed by Carolina Herrera, an honorary co-chair of the evening along with Ms. Obama, Caroline Kennedy, socialite Blaine Trump and actress Renée Zellweger.

“I’m over the moon!” Ms. Price said about the sheer possibility of being near the first lady. “I think I’ll be too shy to go out of my way to meet her, but I’m happy to just be in her company.”

Behind her, be-furred Vogue editor Anna Wintour, arms crossed and sunglasses in place, was being escorted inside. Vanity Fair’s Amy Fine Collins was close behind. “I’m very excited. Not only do we have ballet tonight, but we have politics, too,” said Ms. Collins, whose upper arms were also exposed.

Calvin Klein designer Francisco Costa arrived with model Dree Hemingway, granddaughter of Ernest, on one arm and socialite Amanda Brooks on the other, each outfitted in one of his minimalist dresses. Is he hoping to woo Ms. Obama?

“Why do you think I’m here? I bought a tuxedo for this!” Mr. Costa said. “She’s proven she has a great sensibility. She’s figuring her own way out and doing an amazing job.”

Actress Mariska Hargitay proclaimed herself above all this fashion flim-flam. “I’m not obsessed with what she wears, I’m obsessed with Michelle Obama,” she said firmly before ducking inside. 

Meanwhile, Lynda Carter, the original Wonder Woman, recalled the year she attended the ballet in the company of another first lady: Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis.

“She was so chic,” Ms. Carter said. “I am excited to meet Michelle Obama. She’s just killer. And tall!”

As guests took their seats, Senator Chuck Schumer welcomed Caroline Kennedy to the stage. Ms. Kennedy in turn welcomed the much-awaited first lady, who (having snuck in through an underground entrance) appeared from behind the gold curtain in a sparkly black Azzedine Alaïa cocktail dress. A standing ovation ensued. (Real estate developer Janna Bullock even put her BlackBerry away for a moment to clap.)

After a few gracious words about the importance of “learning through the arts,” Ms. Obama headed to a private box containing Jill Biden, Ms. Kennedy and the White House social secretary, Desirée Rogers.

During the intermission, the VIPs thronged a roped-off reception area. Ripa chatted with Caryn Zucker, wife of NBC president Jeff Zucker; Ms. Wintour greeted billionaire David Koch; and Ms. Rogers huddled with anchors Al Roker and Deborah Roberts.

“There’s just something kind of special about this night to begin with, and then you add Michelle Obama on top of that and …” Mr. Roker gushed.

“You’ll really stay awake,” Ms. Roberts said.

“Yeah, normally I look at this as a good shot at napping,” admitted Mr. Roker. “But I’m thinking this is actually something I should probably stay awake for.”

Wearing a formal belted black dress, Ms. Rogers told the Daily Transom that she and Ms. Obama were enjoying the show.

“It is a great night for America, really,” she said. “To see this lovely ballet, to see these children from the Jackie Kennedy Onassis school perform for the first time, it just brings everything full circle and we’re just delighted to be here.”

Alas, there was no sign of the first lady at the glitzy intermission. And as Mr. Roker pointed out, it would be fairly difficult to clink champagne flutes with her anyway.

“There’s this little thing called the Secret Service that I think will keep everyone from flocking to her,” he said.