Puccini meets Thelma and Louise

[sawyl]

According to Alex Ross' damning review in The New Yorker, the Met's new production of Tosca features something worryingly close to the apocryphal bouncing diva:

Act III is recession-era Zeffirelli, with a few soldiers marching about and a plain tower rising to the right. Cavaradossi is shot without suspense. Tosca runs up a flight of stairs into the tower, and then a stunt double leaps from a window and, thanks to a wire, stops in midair. At first, this looked like a comic malfunction, but a freeze-frame effect was apparently intended, as at the end of "Thelma and Louise." While there is nobility in an ambitious failure, there is no glory in ineptitude.

Still, it could have been worse: there could have been Matrix-style windmilling arms...