Murder, madness and a quest for absolute power. Love cut short by incurable disease. Violence. And, of course, sex. Sounds like the usual movie offerings, doesn t it? But with singing? In Italian and German? Live? When the lights go down at Sandhill Cinema 16 Saturday afternoon, Charles Gounod s Romeo et Juliette will come up on the screen live from the Metropolitan Opera in New York. This is the first year Columbia is getting live satellite feeds of Met operas.

La Boheme and Manon Lescaut are among the eight offerings this season. Over the past year, operas were aired live in Greenville, Charlotte and Augusta. Columbia got a few recorded operas early this year. Last year 115 theaters in the United States took part; it s up to 400 this season. The challenge was that the Met was ahead of the curve, said Julie Borchard-Young, a former pop music executive who came up with the idea after doing a live-into-theaters David Bowie concert.

The technology hadn t spread everywhere yet. Even with limited access, about 330,000 attended movie house operas in the 2006-07 season. This year about 1 million are expected. (Annual attendance at the Metropolitan is 850,000; 8 million listen to live radio broadcasts.) There were some markets where we had to put a little more energy and promotion into it, said Borchard-Young, who took the idea for broadcasts to Peter Gelb when he was named Met general manager two years ago.

But many times, there were people outside looking for tickets. It was like going to a Pink Floyd or U2 concert. These broadcasts are lively, too the opera is shot from multiple angles and provides closeups. Ellen Schlaefer, director of Opera at USC, said that most in the opera world see the Met at the movies as a mixed blessing. Anything that gives opera press is a good thing, she said. But everyone wonders what impact it will have on regional companies that don t have a big budget.