The Best in the Biz

Presenting the Met’s Live in HD cinema simulcasts requires a small army of video professionals, all of whom have extensive experience in the TV and film industry. Get to know some of the forces working behind the scenes to transmit grand opera to movie theaters across six continents. By Christopher Browner

“It’s probably the most demanding job in television,” says camera operator Rob Balton about his work on The Met: Live in HD. He’s just one of the crew of more than 50 who descend on the Met several Saturdays each season to put on the company’s award-winning series of performance transmissions to cinemas—and who bring with them decades of experience at the highest level. From his perch in the forward-most Parterre box on the left side of the opera house, Balton spent more than a decade operating a jib—a 15-foot arm with a camera mounted at the end, allowing sweeping shots of the stage—and despite a resumé boasting 18 Super Bowl halftime shows and 25 Academy Awards ceremonies, he says the challenges of a Met transmission are like none other: “Your arms are up over your head almost the whole show, so it’s very physical, especially for a four-hour opera. Between that and the amount of concentration you need, by the end, you’re mentally and physically spent. But it’s always an adrenaline rush.”

Across the auditorium, Alain Onesto operates a camera 13 rows back from the orchestra pit. His first job in New York was as a cameraman on All My Children in 1980, and he jokes that, “I’ve come full circle: I started with a soap opera, and now I’m at the Met Opera.” In between, Onesto tailed Sylvester Stallone through the streets of Philadelphia for Rocky, shot episodes of America’s Got Talent at Radio City Music Hall, and captured rock legends like the Rolling Stones, Van Halen, and Bruce Springsteen. But it was his early work on All My Children that landed him one of the most memorable gigs of his career—helping director Sydney Pollack plan and shoot the soap-opera scenes in Tootsie. Pollack even cast Onesto in the movie, as (what else?) a cameraman on the set of the fictional soap Southwest General, alongside Dustin Hoffman and Jessica Lange.

Balton and Onesto are just two of the 11 camera operators on hand for each transmission. They take their cues from the series’s longtime director, Gary Halvorson, who has earned 14 Emmy Awards and directed more than 150 episodes of smash-hit shows like Friends, Everybody Loves Raymond, and Two and a Half Men. Halvorson sees his role as the perfect synthesis of his decades of experience. “I studied piano when I was young and then spent my career directing everything from awards shows to sitcoms and the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. Every single one of those fed into opera,” he says, “because opera has theater, dance, comedy, music. And they all folded into this last part of my career, which feels like a miracle.”

Rob Balton and his son, Daniel, shoot the 2023 Super Bowl halftime show, starring Rihanna;

While Halvorson is responsible for capturing the onstage performance, associate director Eden R. Kasle is part of the team that takes viewers behind the curtain at intermission. Kasle is intermission director Dean Gordon’s right hand, keeping each interview to time and ensuring Gordon knows what’s next in the lineup. When he’s not in the Met’s mobile production studio behind the opera house on Amsterdam Avenue, Kasle can be found in the control room at Chelsea Studios on 26th Street, where he directs the talk show Sherri. His day job typically involves more cooking demonstrations and fashion shows than high notes, but Kasle points out that, “Shooting an interview is all about the relationship between the interviewer and the subject. So whether it’s with the HD host or Sherri Shepherd, I want the audience to be part of the conversation, to have them walk away entertained and feeling that they learned something.”

Over the course of his seven years on the Live in HD series, Kasle says he’s also picked up a few lessons that have proved useful for his work on Sherri. “I’ve learned that doing your homework is the most important part of making good television. Just as Gary watches the rehearsal footage and plans every detail ahead of time, whenever we have a musical guest on the show, I watch as much video of the performer as I can and plan out each shot, so we’re putting on the best presentation possible.”

Another member of the team with years of experience in daytime is stage manager Phyllis Digilio (pictured at the top of the page, cueing soprano Nadine Sierra), a 17-year veteran of The View who now spends her Saturdays supervising the backstage crew at intermission. Digilio says the biggest difference between her work in television and her role at the Met is the number of moving parts to consider, explaining that she not only coordinates the dozens of camera operators, technicians, wardrobe stylists, and makeup artists—not to mention a superstar host and gaggle of guests—but must also stay aware of the complicated scene changes going on around them. “I think of it like harmony: If one note is off, the whole song suffers,” she says. Digilio particularly enjoys segments when the cameras peek into a rehearsal room as an artist prepares for an upcoming performance. “To be just feet away from these amazing vocalists while they’re singing—I wasn’t fully aware how powerful their voices are. There have been a couple times I’ve actually been caught off guard to point of tears,” she says.

Left, inside the Live in HD production truck; right, Jim Washburn holds a teleprompter during a pre-show introduction.

Underpinning the entire operation is head utility Jim Washburn, who sees his team as “the behind the scenes of the behind the scenes.” Washburn is in charge of the essential infrastructure and oversees the installation of all the cameras, video monitors, and wiring required for each transmission. And while his load-in begins the Monday before the following weekend’s performance, it’s nothing compared to the three weeks of work that go into his biggest job of the year: outfitting Times Square with miles of cables and connecting scores of TV trucks for the New Year’s Eve ball drop.

Like many of his colleagues, Washburn says that the Live in HD crew is like a family. And he should know: His father, Ron, was a camera operator with the Met dating back to its early PBS telecasts in the 1970s, and today, his daughter, Heidi, serves on the utility team alongside her dad. But whether they’re related by blood or just by a shared commitment to putting on a great show, everyone on the crew is immensely proud of what they’ve accomplished over the past two decades. “When we first started in 2006, this was very new and difficult for a lot of us, but Gary believed in us and kept pushing us to do our best work,” Onesto says. And from his vantage point, the results speak for themselves. “At first, people in the audience didn’t know what I was doing there, but as the seasons went by and they saw the product at the cinema, people started coming up to me and saying, ‘We’re from Ohio, or Tennessee. We’re from China. We’re from France. Thank you so much for doing this. We love watching the HD broadcasts!’”