I load up my cardboard tray with Raisinets, Milk Duds, popcorn, Coke, and bonbons – OK, that’s an exaggeration: I skip the Milk Duds. I make my way down the brightly carpeted hallways flanked by oversized photos of all the greats (Bogie and Bacall, Gable and Monroe) and push open the doors to Theater 8 at the Burbank AMC 16 multiplex.

To my left, on a movie screen the size of Ethiopia, are four gilded tiers of fur- and jewel-bedecked patrons, milling around to the dissonant cacophony of tuning piccolos, violins, trumpets. On my right sit 300 to 400 real-life people, dressed in blue jeans, scruffy Tees, and I think I see a flip flop or two. This is California, after all.

Next – via loudspeaker – the words, “Maestro to the pit.” Video cameras show a lone man making his way through a narrow passageway. He steps into a spotlight. The audience cheers. Then, house lights down, stage lights up, music swells, scrim ascends, and ... action.

For a soccer dad more used to the smells of fresh-mown grass, plopping back in a dark movie theater at 10 a.m. on a Saturday to watch opera is as jarring as a two-fingered poke in the eye by one of the Three Stooges. But this is the new way for a member of the masses like me to see “Aida” or “La Bohème” or, on this day, “Dr. Atomic” relatively cheaply and still get my red licorice.

At least once a month, performances at the Metropolitan Opera in New York are beamed into more than 450 movie theaters in 48 states. Some 1 million people have attended the “Met Live in HD” screenings since they began three years ago by a Colorado-based company, Fathom.

To devotees, the broadcasts are a way for everyone from dentists to drywallers to experience opera at the highest level. But others see them as the equivalent trying to vacation in Maui by watching a video of Don Ho. I decided to attend myself to see what all the fuss is about.

•••

By posture and hair length, the people sitting in my row look as if they would probably be more at home with surfboards and the 1940s. But they know a good deal when they see one. From behind tinted Foster Grants (hey, who would be dumb enough to wear fully darkened sunglasses in a theater?), the guy to my right cackles something about pashmina-wrapped patricians from the “other coast” who paid up to $295 for seats at the Met while we paid only $22.

The sotto voce mumblings up and down the row concur that, in fact, besides price, this is “way better” than box or even front-row seats at the Met. That’s because 10 video cameras are beaming high-definition, live satellite images to the Burbank multiplex direct from the matinee performance at America’s top opera house.

From this vantage point, you can see the twitching nose hairs of Gerald Finley, world-class Canadian baritone, as he hits his heart-rending top notes. [Editor's note: The original version misidentified Mr. Finley's nationality.] You don’t need opera glasses to magnify the undulating tonsils of mezzo-soprano Sasha Cooke as she belts out immortal quotations of Baudelaire – courtesy of the libretto penned by Peter Sellars.

The look and feel of live singing at such ultraclose range – projected in diamond-sharp detail large enough for King Kong – is viscerally overpowering, and possibly, to listen to some purists, damaging to real opera in the long run: They fret that the jumbo-sized Dolby version might supplant the old human-scale opera with real voices.

Hmmmm. In the short run, at least, this particular brush with opera is a lot less damaging to my pocketbook than the real thing – and 3,000 miles closer. And while the 21st-century music to “Doctor Atomic,” by contemporary composer John Adams, isn’t exactly toe-tappin’, it does expand my musical palette.

Not to mention waistline.

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