No one performing onstage in Spain’s Teatro Real opera house is masked, and that alone looks odd these days amid a pandemic.
And that’s even before the second act scene in Antonín Dvořák’s “Rusalka” — about a water nymph who falls in love with a mortal — in which cast members kiss and grope in a feigned, non-socially distanced orgy.
While many of the world’s major venues are shut down, including the Metropolitan Opera in New York, Covent Garden in London and La Scala in Milan, watching a performance at the Teatro Real in Madrid can almost make you forget about the coronavirus.