New Age Tunes in an Old Venue

Dan here. Reinforcements (new officers) have arrived, and my assignment on the visa line is winding down. Finally, I have some time to write.

On Thursday night, we went to a free concert at the Roman Theater in downtown Amman. The concert was filmed, and will air on satellite TV as a concert for peace. The star was Zade Dirani, a young Jordanian John Tesh-style piano player / composer who enjoys the patronage of the royal family, and dedicates songs and concerts to them in return. He was backed by the London Royal Philharmonic.

The huge Roman Theater is both a dream and a nightmare for concert organizers: the venue is stunning, the stuff of PBS pledge specials: the stage backdrop is a row of crumbling marble columns, while the seating area is dug into a hillside that yields no evidence this is the 21st century. See for yourself. Also, the seats are pitched forward so steep that those in the nosebleed sections are still quite near the stage. But there is no parking, there are only two entrances, and access to the steeply pitched seats involves ascending uneven steps worn down over more than a dozen centuries.

I was dreading these steps before we even arrived. Needless to say, there is no seating area set aside for the disabled.

The concert organizers were clever. The (free) tickets showed a start time of 7:30. We knew that Jordanians would never arrive on time, so we aimed to arrive at 7:30 to minimize the time spent sitting on hard, warm stone. There was plenty of available seating in the top section, which was ideal in my reasoning: it's much easier to ascend the scary steps than to descend them. Once seated, I started to scan the area to find the least deadly exit route. Just a few songs into the concert, which got going at 8:30, folks with small children started to slowly make their way out, all heading to the stairs on the theater's "right field" wing. These steps were apparently put in during the 1970s reconstruction, and while still steep, were at least evenly spaced, and unworn by the ages.