Mandatory Good News: Opera House Reopens Doors to a Full House of…House Plants

In the past few weeks, we’ve begun to see rare glimpses of normalcy. That’s because things are beginning to reopen for the first time since most of the world was forced into a proverbial holding pattern for the last three months. Depending on where you live, restaurants are at the very least offering outdoor seating (in some states, places are even allowing indoor seating again), non-essential businesses are reopening, and some of us have been lucky enough to finally get a haircut. Even though dentists’ offices are open, most of us still have no plans to rebook our missed dental appointments. Even movie theaters and comedy clubs are beginning to reopen, and, in Barcelona, a concert was performed for a packed house. It’s just that the attendees likely weren’t what you were thinking.

That’s because, instead of a packed house of people, the concert was performed for a theater full of house plants. Yes, you read that right. Unlike the blow-up dolls, cardboard cutouts, and stuffed animals sitting in for fans at sporting events throughout the world, the Spanish city’s opera house Gran Teatre del Liceu was packed with potted plants. In a rare treat for the foliage used to sitting in a boring greenhouse looking at nothing and definitely not listening to any classical music, the plants were treated to the UceLi string quartet.

The theater seats 2,292. This means that people literally had to walk around and place the plants in each seat. They also had to come back and remove more than 2,000 plants after the concert was over. After viewing the YouTube video, it was definitely worth it.

The most whimsical part of this whole Dr. Suess-like extravaganza is that the quartet played Puccini’s “Crisantemi.” For those who don’t speak Italian, that translates to the very hard to spell “Chrysanthemums.” We can thank conceptual artist Eugenio Ampudia for this unique concert. It’s just what we needed.

Photo: Emilio Morenatti/AP

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