Final curtains

“I WANT to blow you all. Blow you all. A kiss,” trilled Sarah Joy Miller (pictured, in a pink confection), who played the title role in “Anna Nicole”, a New York City Opera production at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. The opera depicted the life of Anna Nicole Smith, a Playboy model who, at the age of 26, married a Texan oil billionaire of 89. She went on to become a reality-show diva and tabloid queen. The bawdy comic libretto (she ordered her plastic surgeon to “Supersize me”) gave way in the second half to a dark verismo. The final aria, during which she dies, was as wrenching as the death of Violetta, the consumptive courtesan-heroine of “La Traviata”. It is also a reminder of how she died in real life: with an audience watching.

The curtain went down on “Anna Nicole” on September 28th. Three days later, a metaphorical curtain fell on the New York City Opera. Crippled by financial problems going back at least three decades, the 70-year-old company announced on October 1st that it was shutting down and would file for bankruptcy. Last month, it had warned that unless it could raise $7m by the end of September, Chapter 11 was likely. Pleas for money reached a crescendo when the company took its appeal to Kickstarter, an online platform for crowdfunding. In all, it raised only about $2m, not including $301,000 on Kickstarter.