At the Met

The Barber of Seville

SATURDAY, March 20 @ 6:00pm

Count Almaviva comes in disguise to the house of Dr. Bartolo to serenade Rosina (”Ecco ridente”). Dr. Bartolo keeps Rosina, whom he intends to marry, confined to the house. Almaviva pays the musicians and decides to wait until daylight in the hope of seeing her. Figaro the Barber, who has access to the houses in Seville and knows the town’s secrets and scandals, arrives and describes his busy life (”Largo al factotum”). The Count sings another serenade to Rosina, calling himself Lindoro, a poor student. Figaro devises a plan: the Count will disguise himself as a drunken soldier quartered at Dr. Bartolo’s house to gain access to Rosina. The Count is excited about this plan while Figaro looks forward to a nice cash payoff from the grateful Count (”All’idea di quel metallo”).

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Butte, America

Tuesday, March 16 @ 8:00pm & 11:00pm

As Thomas Edison prepared to throw the switch that would signal the dawn of the electric age, an epic story was unfolding in the copper-rich mountains of Montana. BUTTE, AMERICA chronicles the rise and fall of a small mining town with a larger-than-life spirit—where fortunes were made and lost, and where community was precious, but life was cheap.

In the late 1800s, Butte, Montana, was one of dozens of frontier mining towns that sprang up nationwide. The discovery of copper ore in Butte’s mines coincided with the push to electrify America. Copper, prized for its conductivity, was needed in vast quantities—immediately.

Overnight, Butte became “the Richest Hill on Earth,” the most lucrative copper mining region in the world. Miners from Ireland and England flocked to Butte. Mines like the Berkeley, the Saint Lawrence, the Moonlight and the Neversweat employed thousands—but they needed more.

Known as the “Pittsburgh of the West,” Butte’s population swelled to 90,000, morphing into a vibrant, gritty, urban oasis perched on jagged hillsides. Miners from Scandanavia, Eastern Europe and the Phillipines established neighborhoods—Finntown, Parrot Flats, McQueen, Meaderville—each with its own churches, mom-and-pop stores and schools. Rules in the mines were posted in 16 languages; above ground, the largest red light district in the West flourished.
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LONDON’S LONGEST NIGHT

SUNDAY, MARCH 14 @ 7:00PM & 11:00PM

Following the Dickensian saga of law and disorder, the fires of history burn fiercely in THE BLITZ: LONDON’S LONGEST NIGHT, airing on PBS Wednesday, February 15, 2006, 9:00-10:30 p.m. ET. On the evening of December 29, 1940, the German Luftwaffe dropped tens of thousands of incendiary bombs on the heart of London, hoping to break the spirit of the British people and leave them begging for peace. As firemen and workers fought all night to control the burning, many risking their lives, Londoners fled to shelters, uncertain if their homes would survive the bombing. The following morning they emerged after a terrifying and sleepless night to face the smoking ruins of the city. Based on more than two years’ research uncovering eyewitness accounts, this program transforms intimate true stories into emotional drama. The film innovatively mixes CGI and archival footage to create spectacular scenes that bring the awful night to life.

THURSDAY, MARCH 11 @ 8:00PM & 11:00PM

Most people best know the chicken from their dinner plates — whether as thigh, wing or drumstick. Consumers barely pause a moment to consider the bird’s many virtues. Filmmaker Mark Lewis (Cane Toads: An Unnatural History and Rat) expands the frontiers of popular awareness and delightfully reveals that this small, common and seemingly simple animal is as complex and grand as any of Earth’s creatures.

Sting: Songs from the Labyrinth

Wednesday, March 10 @ 8:00pm & 11:00pm

Born in 1563 into an age of religious and political strife, English composer and court musician John Dowland has captivated performers and listeners alike with his serene and introspective music since the late 16th century. Composed primarily for lute but also for small ensembles, Dowland’s music remains arresting in its simplicity, spellbinding with melancholy and joy. It is perhaps inevitable that Sting — one of today’s most internationally acclaimed troubadours — would be drawn to revisit Dowland’s work from a contemporary perspective, some 400 years after the composer’s death. “The songs of John Dowland have been gently haunting me for over 20 years,” says the Grammy Award-winning Sting, who had little knowledge of the composer until the gift of an exquisitely manufactured lute rekindled his interest in the Elizabethan musician. SONGS FROM THE LABYRINTH features Sting’s yearning tenor accompanied by acclaimed Bosnian lute player Edin Karamazov to perform Dowland’s timeless songs, interspersed with recitations from Dowland’s personal correspondence to offer insight into his life and times.

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BETWEEN THE FOLDS

TUESDAY, MARCH 9 @ 8:00PM & 11:00PM

Origami may seem an unlikely medium for understanding and explaining the world. But around the globe, several fine artists and theoretical scientists are abandoning more conventional career paths to forge lives as modern-day paper folders. Through origami, these offbeat and provocative minds are reshaping ideas of creativity and revealing the relationship between art and science.

BETWEEN THE FOLDS chronicles 10 of their stories. Featuring interviews with and insights into the practice of these intrepid paper folders, the film opens with three of the world’s foremost origami artists: a former sculptor in France who folds caricatures in paper rivaling the figures of Daumier and Picasso; a hyper-realist who walked away from a successful physics career to challenge the physics of a folded square instead; and an artisanal papermaker who folds impressionistic creations from the very same medium he makes from scratch.

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FRIDAY, APRIL 2

Fort James, South Dakota@ 8:00PM & 11:00PM

Time Team America takes a group of archeologists and scientists and puts them in a tough situation: they have just 72 hours to investigate a site and report back on their findings. Archaeology is both time and labor intensive. Some sites can take months or even years to excavate properly. With only three days to work with, Time Team brings on specialists and experts in order to hone in on key aspects of a site that we can focus a lot of attention on in little time. This allows us to get results without sacrificing the science.

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AT CLOSE RANGE

SATURDAY, MARCH 6 @ 8:00PM

National Geographic photographer Joel Sartore shoots in some of the most exotic locales on earth, but often in wretched conditions for weeks on end, and always under pressure to produce pictures worthy of publication in a legendary magazine.

A devoted husband and father of three, he often wonders if it’s the best job in the world, or the worst.

At Close Range with National Geographic provides a rare glimpse of the havoc a tough, dangerous job can create for one’s personal life, especially for someone like Joel Sartore.

On the job, Sartore has been chased by bears, wolves, alligators and musk oxen. Recently, as he watched an anaconda seize an egret in the Pantanal of Brazil (observing how he “could hear the bones of the bird giving way in small muffled explosions as it was crushed to death”), the eight-foot snake turned and struck at him, but missed.

The film features interviews with National Geographic photo editors in Washington, D.C. – the people who painstakingly edit 30,000 to 40,000 individual frames down to the 10 to 20 that appear in a typical magazine story.
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THE PLUTO FILES

SATURDAY, DECEMBER 17 @ 10:00PM

When the American Museum of Natural History’s Hayden Planetarium stopped calling Pluto a planet, director Neil deGrasse Tyson found himself at the center of a firestorm led by angry, Pluto-loving elementary school students who wrote letters like the one above. But what is it about this cold, distant, icy rock that captures so many hearts? Now, almost 10 years after the news broke on the front page of The New York Times, “Pluto Not a Planet? Only in New York,” and nearly four years after the IAU (International Astronomical Union) officially reclassified the ninth planet as a plutoid, NOVA travels cross-country with Tyson to find out. Based on Tyson’s book of the same name.

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DOLLEY MADISON

MONDAY, MARCH 27 @ 7:00PM & 10:PM

Dolley Madison lived through the two wars that established the U.S., was friends with the first 12 Presidents, and watched America evolve from a struggling young republic to the first modern democracy in the world. She was nicknamed Queen Dolley, and when she died in 1849 at the age of 81, one of the last remaining members of the founding generation, Washington City honored her with the largest state funeral the capital had ever seen for a woman.

Born prior to the signing of the Declaration of Independence, Dolley Payne grew up during a time when the country was striving to develop an identity. The daughter of strict Quaker parents, Dolley showed an early interest in contemporary dress and gossip, what her friends considered the evil temptations of the material world. Growing up in the capital city of Philadelphia presented many social opportunities for Dolley, but she acquiesced to her father’s wishes that she marry a young Quaker lawyer, John Todd. After only three years of marriage, though, Dolley’s husband died of Yellow Fever in an epidemic that also claimed her youngest son. Widowed and a single parent, she soon met U.S. Congressional Representative James Madison. Four months later, the couple married.
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