The audience watches as dawn breaks over a prison in Rome. The year is 1800. Just a few minutes ago, we heard Scarpia, the corrupt, lecherous police chief, promise the title character, an opera diva, that Mario Cavaradossi, her condemned lover and a political prisoner, will be spared. The firing squad will have blanks in their rifles.

Alone with Cavaradossi, Tosca, the consummate actress, directs his fake death. She tells him to fall at the first shot, but to be careful not to hurt himself. "With my experience in the theater," she says, "I'd know how to manage it."

"And fall down properly," she orders him mockingly.

"Like Tosca on the stage," he adds with a laugh as the soldiers pull him against the wall.

When they finally fire (Scarpia has, of course, lied, and the blanks, unbeknown to her, are real bullets), she calls out amid grand military march music, "There! Die! Ah, what an actor!" And as the soldiers file out, just before she discovers his (very) dead body, she whispers, "Oh, Mario, do not move! They're going now. Be still! They're going."

In the annals of opera's deliriously excruciating moments, this small but insane meta-moment reigns supreme. That the opera ends a minute or two later with Tosca jumping off the roof--singing a high B flat, no less--is just icing on the cake. The whole work is perfect melodrama, several times over: by Puccini, the master of intensely melodic emotional manipulation, and based on a play that Victorien Sardou (whose advice to young playwrights was, simply, "Torture the women") wrote for his muse, the definitive 19th-century tragedienne Sarah Bernhardt. Tosca became one of Bernhardt's signature roles; it was while jumping off the prison parapet during a 1905 performance in Rio de Janeiro that she injured her leg, which later had to be amputated. (The interweaving histories of the play, opera and actress are explored in David Greenspan's rough but promising new play Jump, presented last week in a workshop production as part of the Public Theater's Under the Radar festival.)

So famous and influential was Bernhardt's portrayal of the play's Tosca that operatic Toscas are still expected to do bits of stage business that she incorporated into the work more than a century ago. The result is that few operas have a visual feel and performance practice as frozen as this one. It's resulted in such hypernaturalistic projects as an Emmy-winning 1992 live broadcast of the opera from the actual settings in Rome, and Franco Zeffirelli's lavish 1985 Metropolitan Opera production, which got as close to those actual settings as a stage show could.

Mr. Zeffirelli's shameless opulence was laughable in 1985 and became even more so as the years passed, but Tosca was able to take such treatment, and even benefit from it. Puccini was famously detail-oriented, and there is nothing general about Tosca. The work is precise about places as well as the month, the year and the times of day in which it takes place. The opera is gloriously limited, and that is the source of its power. It knows what it is, it knows every musical and theatrical trick in the book, and it pulls them all off as well as any work ever has.

A comparison with another famous 19th-century diva vehicle is instructive. Verdi's La Traviata--which the composer originally called, in keeping with its aspirations to archetype, Love and Death--is about more than a consumptive prostitute; it's about society, gender, power. An abstract production of Traviata--like Willy Decker's acclaimed new one for the Met--is workable because any setting is just a vehicle for its broader themes. That doesn't mean stinting the "human story." The characters and their struggles emerge through the presentation of those themes as much as vice versa.

Tosca, on the other hand, while also a brilliant work of music theater, is about nothing more than what it's about: the collision of an opera singer, her lover and a police chief in Rome in June 1800, during the Napoleonic Wars that give the opera its political context. It has no pretensions to grander themes or deeper meanings. It is a riveting theatrical machine; you just have to turn it on.

Although Mr. Zeffirelli's overstuffed Met Traviata productions felt suffocating, then, his realistic Tosca felt right (or closer to it, at least). It's no coincidence that the Zeffirelli productions that have lasted longest and been most beloved have been for Puccini operas. Like the director's work, these operas are "about" nothing broader than what they're about.

Luc Bondy's production, which was booed when it replaced Mr. Zeffirelli's on opening night of the Met's 2009-2010 season, seemed intended to restore shock and theatricality to the opera. It is still, a season later (it runs through April), full of ideas, as if Mr. Bondy has been assiduously searching for some "there" there. It was a strategy that had worked with his Salome, which played several European houses, but here he is up against an opera that refuses to give an inch to ingenuity. Mr. Bondy takes away Mr. Zeffirelli's traditional Roman settings--the opera seems to be taking place in some confused amalgam of 1800, 1880 and 1950 Italy--and removes most of the famous Bernhardt interpolations.

The result is a Tosca that, rather than showing new theatrical fire, is unaccountably dull. Sondra Radvanovsky, the genial star of this year's revival, lacks the edge to put over Mr. Bondy's chair throwings and portrait rippings. (To be fair, even the game Karita Mattila, who opened the production, couldn't make all that work.) In place of the iconic Bernhardt ending of Act II--when Tosca, after murdering Scarpia, turns suddenly prayerful, placing candles on either side of the body--this Tosca sinks exhausted to the couch, fanning herself slowly, like a Tennessee Williams character. It's understandable, and admirable, to want to break through ossified performance traditions, but Mr. Bondy's replacements just don't play.

That Ms. Radvanovsky anchored her vocal performance entirely to an excellent rendition of Tosca's Act II aria, "Vissi d'arte," didn't help. Elsewhere she offered gleaming high notes, but her pitch was frequently off in the first act, and she sounded edgy in the third, by which point Mr. Bondy's production turns utterly listless. (Cavaradossi, played by the ardent last-minute replacement Roberto Alagna, now, bizarrely, plays Seventh Seal-esque chess with his guard.)

The musicologist Joseph Kerman will never live down calling Tosca a "shabby little shocker" in his 1956 book Opera as Drama. But his point, about the opera's savage effectiveness and the smallness of its scope, is true. When it is good, there is no more gripping night at the theater, but on its own limited terms. Mr. Bondy is hardly afraid of truly operatic intensity, but he gives it all to Scarpia. His conception of Tosca as occasionally violent but generally passive shows that he is trying to rethink the character. But he's doing that in an opera that doesn't reward such creativity, in which brilliance, more than elsewhere, really does result from hewing to the standard script.

zwoolfe@observer.com

Well, the season-the first to be planned entirely by Mr. Gelb-is over, and the evaluations are in. New Yorker critic Alex Ross, who once praised Mr. Gelb's "imaginative leadership," wrote (in the March 29 issue) a piece skeptical of the Met's "technologically dazzling, emotionally arid" artistic direction. Justin Davidson echoed that sentiment in the April 18 issue of New York magazine, writing, "Sometimes Gelb's spirit of innovation looks indistinguishable from confusion." In its May issue, Vanity Fair published a long analysis of the company's finances-highlighting its $47 million deficit-by Nina Munk, who wrote, "[I]f you spend as much time as I have examining the Met's financial statements, you're likely to conclude that, in its current state, the Met is not sustainable."

In other words, there's a backlash. There's also, predictably, a backlash to that backlash. Anne Midgette, on her Washington Post blog, criticized the critics for taking at face value Mr. Gelb's self-described innovations. The problem, according to Ms. Midgette, isn't that the Met has changed, but that it hasn't changed enough: Its aesthetic is as "middlebrow" as it was under Mr. Gelb's predecessor, Joseph Volpe, with the same impulse to "see something unusual in a new production, get nervous about it, and try to rein it in."

James Jorden, the Post's critic and editor of the opera blog Parterre Box, also chided his fellow critics for what he called the "short-sighted tendency to act as if unsuccessful productions at the Met suddenly began with Gelb's arrival," publishing on his site a list of all the new productions put on during Mr. Volpe's tenure, including quite a few doozies, like the Graham Vick Trovatore and not one but two failed Lucias.

The reminder of the old regime is useful, since the major difficulty in creating compelling theater at the Met remains the same as it was under Mr. Volpe: the house's logistics. A director's concept, even a brilliant one, doesn't equal cohesive drama; that results from the kind of focused, extended rehearsal work that's next to impossible when you're putting on almost 30 operas, each with distinct technical and musical requirements, over seven months of seven performances a week. Even new productions at the Met generally have under a month of rehearsals (and no previews period for fine-tuning), and the singers may be around for just a fraction of that time.

The results speak for themselves. Not a single performance I saw at the Met this season was an organic dramatic experience in which the people onstage seemed to be inhabiting the same theatrical and emotional world. To be sure, sometimes the Met came very close to getting it right, as with Patrice Chéreau's From the House of the Dead-which was granted an unusually long rehearsal period-and William Kentridge's Nose, both of which won widespread praise. But several of the season's less successful productions were marred by casts thrown together at the last minute. Marlis Petersen was flown in with three days to spare to replace Natalie Dessay in Hamlet, and her Ophelia was vague and unfocused. Rumor has it that Anna Netrebko, starring in Tales of Hoffmann, was available for just two rehearsals before the run-throughs, which may explain the lack of real psychological depth in her portrayal of Antonia.

Contrast these examples with Christopher Alden's production of Don Giovanni at City Opera in the fall, for which the entire cast rehearsed for six weeks, yielding a riveting performance true to Mr. Alden's vision. You could argue with aspects of the production, but it was all of a piece, which was never the case at the Met this season. There were compelling visual and dramatic ideas floating around Bartlett Sher's Hoffmann, for instance, but they were eclipsed by cast changes, hasty preparation and the kind of bland confusion that indicates direction by committee. The Met at this point is not a place where even a talented opera director can make good, strong work, let alone a place where a director inexperienced with the genre-as so many of Mr. Gelb's favored artists are-can be guided toward an understanding of it.

There was little evidence this season of directors with a real sense of how opera works theatrically, as a balance of spectacle and intimacy, emotional outpouring and restraint. On the rare occasions when this balance was achieved, it was by singers, and generally in revivals. That reviled Tosca returned in the spring with a charismatic new cast, including Jonas Kaufmann and Bryn Terfel. Ms. Netrebko, ridiculous in Hoffmann, gave the performance of the year as a dignified, heartbreaking Mimi in La Bohéme, singing from her first entrance with a darkness that colored even her early happiness with premonitions of her tragic end. It was a reminder that "theatricality" is not a detachable quality that can be grafted onto "opera"; operatic theater is inextricably linked to music, to the voice.

How can the Met become a more dependable source of the kind of opera we dream of? Eight new productions a year may simply be too many to ensure excellence. Demanding longer rehearsal periods is another method, though one unlikely to be adopted. Most importantly, the company needs real artistic administration, invested with power that both Mr. Gelb and the Met's artists respect. There can and should be a "Director of Production," akin to John Dexter in the '70s and '80s, a person charged with maintaining a house style and a level of quality, personally responsible for one or two productions a year and also expected to liaise with and advise the season's other directors.

Music director James Levine, meanwhile, is clearly nearing the end of his storied career, and his replacement must be someone capable not just of conducting the repertory but in guiding the company artistically. Someone, in other words, who could have said to Renée Fleming and her management that while the Met would love to mount a new production for Ms. Fleming, Armida was simply not right for her at this point in her career.

Of course, seasons had highs and lows under Mr. Volpe, too, but when vivid theatricality is so loudly promoted as the raison d'être of Mr. Gelb's Met, its absence is keenly felt and must be addressed. In 2007, Anne Midgette wrote that "the Met has become perhaps the most exciting cultural institution in New York, and everyone is waiting to see if it can stay that way." The Met has slyly edited that down to "the most exciting cultural institution in New York" for its current advertising campaign, but the "perhaps" in the original quote remains truer than ever, and whether it can stay that way is still very much in question.

editorial@observer.com

Reviewing a telecast of the Met's controversial restaging of Tosca—the one greeted with loud booing in September—Joshua Kosman deems New Yorkers "a big bunch of weenies":

Seriously, this is what passes for a fiasco in the Big Apple? This muscular, clear-sighted and often powerful staging of a familiar repertory standard - marred, admittedly, by a handful of small but painful directorial missteps - is all it takes to arouse the collective ire of New York's opera crowd?

Kosman deems the show "a bare-knuckled exploration of political and sexual power, unimpeded by fussiness or luxury."

Always impeding power with fussiness and luxury—that's New York's problem.

At this point, Peter Gelb would probably gladly settle for just one day. Instead, his problems, which began opening night, are stretching into the third week of the Metropolitan Opera’s 2009-10 season, the first to be planned entirely by him. There’s booing left and right, the press is biting at his heels, his marquee music director is going under the knife again, he has to fly a replacement conductor around in private jets, and even his singers (when they’re not dropping out) are doubtful about the controversial new Luc Bondy Tosca, which replaced Franco Zeffirelli’s beloved production.

“When I signed my contract, I thought it would be for the Zeffirelli production,” soprano Violeta Urmana told the Observer. Ms. Urmana, currently in town for Aida, will sing Tosca in the Bondy production’s first revival next season. Though she dislikes sitting in the Met’s heavy air-conditioning, she plans to see the production before leaving New York. “I just saw some stage sets,” she said, “and it wasn’t somehow so revolutionary. Of course, it was not so beautiful like the Zeffirelli production, which was wonderful.”

Marcelo Alvarez, Tosca’s tenor lead, did Ms. Urmana one better, comparing the production to a car wreck in an interview with the San Francisco Chronicle. “It’s like there’s an accident in the middle of street,” he said. “People say, ‘Ah, I don’t want to go.’ But they want to see the blood.”

They may see blood, but not James Levine. Mr. Levine, the Met’s music director, led opening night but is missing his other four Tosca performances because of back surgery. He will also be out for three Met Rosenkavaliers as well as concerts with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, of which he is also music director.

His Rosenkavalier replacement is Edo de Waart, who just started as music director of the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra. De Waart will be traveling back and forth several times between New York and Wisconsin for rehearsals and performances, including on Oct. 16, when he is conducting an 11:15 a.m. concert in Milwaukee and a 7:30 p.m. opera at the Met. The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported last week that “the Met will arrange [de Waart’s] flights, which may include private jets,” an extravagant choice in the midst of a multimillion-dollar budget deficit and after sweeping staff pay cuts. The Met did not return phone calls before deadline.

Not everything has been bad news. The revival of Le Nozze di Figaro is youthful and exciting, and the debuts of Emma Bell in Figaro and Georg Zeppenfeld in Die Zauberflöte were notable. But it’s hard to argue that the season has started off on the right foot.

The gala premiere of Tosca was widely covered by the press (yay!), but not for the best of reasons (“boo!”). Any publicity is good publicity, but the reviews were scathing. “How did this dopey show get on stage?” asked Bloomberg News. The Wall Street Journal called it “minimally provocative” and “tepid.” “Heavy-handed,” said the Times. The Associated Press screamed that it was “one of the company’s biggest failures in decades.” The review in The New Yorker was titled, simply, “Fiasco.”

In that review, Alex Ross charitably floated the possibility that “once Bondy is safely on the plane back home it should be relatively easy to devise new stage business to replace his lamer notions.” But it’s been hard for the cast and conductor to make adjustments because of a series of cancellations and indispositions. The production’s original Scarpia, star baritone Bryn Terfel, long ago dropped out of the first performances (he’s singing four in April), and his replacement withdrew only a week before opening night on Sept. 21. George Gagnidze ended up with the role, then promptly got sick. At the second performance, in an unusual arrangement, Gagnidze acted Scarpia while it was sung from the side of the stage by Carlo Guelfi, who hadn’t had time to rehearse the blocking. By Sept. 28, Guelfi had learned the staging just in time to cede the role back to Gagnidze for the Oct. 3 matinee.

Much more serious is Mr. Levine’s medical leave, his third in recent years, which is reviving discussion about his ability to maintain his taxing schedule, rumblings that will no doubt intensify as the 2011 due date of his Met contract draws nearer. As the Times’ Anthony Tommasini wrote on Saturday, “The Boston Symphony and the Met have to be worried about the implications of Mr. Levine’s recurring ailments.” Mr. Gelb has said that Mr. Levine has the Met position for as long as he wants it, but pressure is mounting on both men and the Met’s board to address the situation.

It may not be solely a matter of health. Jeremy Eichler, the classical music critic of the Boston Globe, told the Observer that many of Mr. Levine’s medical problems wouldn’t have been prevented by a lighter conducting load. “The health issue can be a red herring here,” said Mr. Eichler, who has been critical of what he has perceived as Mr. Levine’s recent turn towards more conservative programming in Boston. “The real question is what he’s bringing artistically to both organizations and whether he’s realizing his full potential at either one.”

Mr. Levine is not the only Met conductor with problems. At the first performance of Aida on Friday, Daniele Gatti was booed, a rarity for singers and conductors in the house. The Times reported that Mr. Gatti had also been booed while conducting Aida this past spring in Munich. Peter Gelb’s goal for his company—director-driven, highly theatrical opera—is strikingly European, but if European-style perpetual booing comes with it, he may end up regretting what he wished for.

These messy opening weeks ensure that even more attention will be paid to the New Year’s Eve premiere of the season’s other new take on a repertory staple, Richard Eyre’s Carmen, which has had its own casting dramas. If Carmen is a success, the season’s tumultuous start may be forgotten. If it’s another fiasco, though, there will be serious talk about Peter Gelb’s artistic leadership. At Saturday’s premiere of Il Barbiere di Siviglia, when Dr. Bartolo sang, “A man’s not safe even in his own house,” it was hard not to think of Mr. Gelb.

zwoolfe@observer.com

Fifty years from now, the next Edith Wharton, if she could have seen the crowd that gathered to see Ms. Mattila on the evening of Sept. 21, 2009, could easily begin her great novel of New York exactly the way the last one did. So little has changed.

And now she’s had her first opening night with the company, performing Tosca, that part of parts, for the first time outside her native Finland. The new production, by Luc Bondy, replaces one of the supersize Franco Zeffirelli stalwarts that keep Peter Gelb up at night with anxiety and that he is, little by little, getting rid of. (Richard Eyre’s Carmen will supplant Mr. Zeffirelli’s in a New Year’s Eve premiere this year. Two down; many, many choristers and goats to go.)

The Zeffirelli Tosca was one of the better liked of the Master of Excess’ Met offerings. The hulking but attractive sets were closely modeled on the real Roman locations described in the libretto. The use of the Met’s hydraulics system, which allowed the entire third-act set to distractingly lower halfway through, was eventually dropped, and in recent years the result was big but lovable, and actually somewhat illuminating. The opera and the Sardou play on which it’s based are both set in a very specific time and place, and the drama of the piece is directly tied to the situation in Italy at the time of the Napoleonic Wars. This is not to say that there aren’t other, and even better, ways to do Tosca than Mr. Zeffirelli’s. But once the production was streamlined a bit, it was clear that there were certainly worse ways.

When the curtain opened on Act I on Monday night, it seemed as though Mr. Bondy’s production, surprisingly for those in the audience expecting something zany, would be as traditional, in its way, as the one it was replacing. Indeed, while the old production’s elaborately Baroque Sant’Andrea della Valle was replaced with a much starker Romanesque interior—as if everything had been stripped from Mr.

Zeffirelli’s walls—the new set’s massive scale felt familiar.

But the realism at the beginning turned out to be misleading. “Our Tosca is set in the time of Napoleon,” Mr. Bondy says definitively in the Met’s season book, and this was plausible until the arrival of Scarpia and his henchmen, who were dressed like ominous Victorian types out of a Dickens novel, though Scarpia’s coat was made of a distinctly fascist black leather. Things got even more complicated in Act II, with Scarpia’s room in the Palazzo Farnese done up with mid-century (20th century, that is) modernist furniture and vintage maps of Italy hung on the walls as if to remind the singers and audience where the action is actually taking place. Then for Act III it was back to stark stone, a gorgeous re-imagining of the roof of the Castel Sant’Angelo as a precipice overlooking the sea.

And here, another Wharton quote comes to mind: “An unalterable and unquestioned law of the musical world required that the German text of French operas sung by Swedish artists should be translated into Italian for the clearer understanding of English-speaking audiences.”

Only instead of translating languages, it’s resetting the history that seems to be the new obsession.

It’s possible that with all the cross-temporal stylization around Scarpia and the act he dominates (the second), Mr. Bondy is making a point about how his evil—the torture and police deceptions and craven backroom deals, found mostly in Act II—transcends time and place. As he says in the season book, “Cruelty is not specific to a certain time or era.” Indeed, comparing older versions of the set designs to the end result shows that the Act II set was changed to make it less abstractly timeless and more explicitly modern, as if to place as close to our own time as possible the scene in which the torture of Cavaradossi takes place. All this is well and good, but it strands the two protagonists, Tosca and Cavaradossi, in comparative irrelevance; if Scarpia’s part of the story is the part that’s interesting and topical, there’s less reason to care about the part that’s merely traditional.

Making Scarpia and his surroundings stand out also creates an odd imbalance in an opera so focused on its diva. Puccini provided in Tosca a character—an opera singer herself—who embodies the medium: Her intense emotions are constantly kept in check by a corrective sense of restraint. It’s the effort to restrain her emotions, and not the emotions themselves, that makes the tension almost unbearable.

Both the music and libretto indicate that Tosca’s fury and jealousy are always checked almost immediately after they flare up. In Ms. Mattila’s and Mr. Bondy’s conception, though, these emotions are worn far too much on her sleeve. This was Tosca on the warpath from her first entrance, tearing sheets off benches, throwing chairs, stabbing paintings, noisily collapsing to the ground at the end of her big Act II aria.

There was little sense of her religiosity, her modesty—the things that make her great act of violence so shocking and devastating. Tellingly, after killing Scarpia, this Tosca didn’t arrange candles and place a crucifix on the body; she lay down on a couch and slowly fanned herself, as if the murder were all in a day’s work. Ms. Mattila was physically fearless throughout, as always, but for once that wasn’t what she needed to be.

And she sounded uneasier in the part than she looked. She did some lovely soft singing, but especially in the last two acts, her voice spread under pressure at the top of her range, and the end of “Vissi d’arte” was rough going. But she was certainly spared the boos that were accorded the production team during their bows, which were spurred perhaps by loyalty to Mr. Zeffirelli, or perhaps by the simulated blow job given to Scarpia in the second act. Mr. Bondy seemed pleased by the catcalls; though much of the production ended up being rather conventional, the boos proved that he had done something “controversial,” “provocative.”

Yet controversy and provocation—indeed, everything on stage—take a backseat on opening night, which is really one of life’s great pleasures. An immaculately dressed young man seated in a box, hair swept back and gold scarf tight around his neck, perched on his chair and eagerly scanned the other boxes. He gesticulated and pointed and whispered to his friends about the people he had identified. He looked just like Wharton’s Larry Lefferts, “the foremost authority on ‘form’ in New York.”

Meanwhile, on Times Square, thousands of people (from the looks of it) gathered to watch the show on the NASDAQ jumbotron, in folding chairs that have been put out in the street to improve the cultural condition of the city. That’s democracy—or at least, noblesse oblige.

zwoolfe@observer.com

Perhaps it had something to do with how the opera has evolved socially since the days when Countess Olenska and Newland Archer could use the occasion to gaze at one another across the theatre. Does the opening night still matter as much in New York society as it once did?

“No,” said singer Billy Joel, who arrived with a date, a pretty brunette by the name of Deborah Dampiere, who was wearing a floor-length Badgley Mischka gown. “I still think people want to go because it’s the beginning of the fall and it’s a thing to do but I think those days of La Belle Epoque are over.”

Reporters were interested in the opera of Mr. Joel’s personal life and inquired about the state of his divorce proceedings from Katie Lee Joel, right in front of his date. His publicist protested, but the singer answered. “It’s a free country, she can ask whatever she wants,” he told the publicist. “How are the divorce proceedings going? I don’t know. Ask my lawyer.”

“For now, I’m enjoying dating this lovely lady,” he later added.

Designer Jason Wu arrived with Julie Macklowe, wife of real estate developer William Macklowe and portfolio manager at Macklowe Asset Management. Ms. Macklowe was wearing one of Mr. Wu’s ruffled mini-dresses from the Spring ’10 collection, which he showed just last week.

“Straight off the runway!” bragged Mr. Wu. “Hot off the presses!” added Ms. Macklowe and they both laughed. This was Mr. Wu’s first time at the Met Opera, but not Ms. Macklowe’s.

“I think listening to beautiful music is a long trend,” Ms. Macklowe said of the opera tradition. “It’s an art just like fashion, but it’s always more about the production than actually seeing and being seen.”

Gravel-voiced actor Harvey Fierstein actually seemed to know something about the opera. He went to the old Metropolitan Opera House on Broadway as a child and in the late 70s, worked in the coat room downstairs at Lincoln Center to see Beverly Sills perform her last show in New York. “I wanted to see it, but I couldn’t afford a ticket,” said Mr. Fierstein.

“I wish more people would figure out that opera is wonderful, that it’s not scary,” he said. And what makes it so scary?  “It’s PBS! It’s PBS. But it’s not true. I mean everyone dies in this opera. There’s blood everywhere. It’s wonderful.”

Next came two, very tall, pregnant ladies in alarming high heels: model Karolina Kurkova and actress Leelee Sobieski, who is engaged to designer Adam Kimmel.

Ms. Sobieski, wearing a knee-length red Hermes dress and rubbing her belly, said she is keeping the sex of the baby a secret, the wedding might be in the spring and in the meantime, she is eating lots of ice cream and mac 'n' cheese. “I like little-kid food,” she said.

Actor Ed Norton snuck in behind Ms. Sobieski but did not stop to talk to the Transom. Neither did designer Diane von Furstenberg, who was wearing a glittery teal number and arrived husband, Barry Diller. “No, no. We’ve got to go,” she said. Mr. Diller lovingly patted her backside as they entered the opera house.  

Designer Zac Posen was supposed to attend with actress Mischa Barton, but by 6:45, the national anthem music had been played and the show had started. Mr. Posen eventually came and ran inside and Ms. Barton arrived separately, closer to the intermission.