Entertainment

BRAVO, IT’S FREE

THEY came, they clapped, they had lunch . . . then clapped and cried and clapped some more. The Metropolitan Opera yesterday opened its doors for a free dress rehearsal, and 3,000 people were only too happy to take a seat. Or stand.

“Lucia di Lammermoor” – starring French soprano Natalie Dessay, whose mascara-stained face adorns buses and kiosks around the city – opens the Met’s season Monday. Judging from the reaction at its four-hour rehearsal, it’s already a hit.

Those who say classical music is dead haven’t seen Lincoln Center this week – when 1,000 seats for the New York Philharmonic’s Tuesday night opener with Yo-Yo Ma, televised on giant screens on the plaza, were claimed as quickly as they were set up. But yesterday belonged to “Lucia,” the first of the Met’s three open houses this season.

“It’s the best ‘Lucia’ I’ve ever seen,” cried Mario Locicero, who says he’s seen the Lammermoor lass lose her mind since the ’50s, and had ridden 2½ hours from Columbia County to see Dessay lose hers.

Not everyone in the audience – a mingling of retirees in bifocals, 20-somethings in flip-flops and clueless folks of all ages in shorts – was a maven.

“I’m here because Joe brought me,” said 26-year-old Justin Scribner, pointing to Joe Passoni, also 26. Passoni says he’s loved opera “ever since I was little.”

“People think it’s just women singing arias,” said Passoni, who’d also lassoed a denim-jacketed Maureen Karb, 27, for the day, “but there’s a lot more. I love the duets.”

“The wedding scene was amazing,” Karb said. She says they ordered their free tickets online, “refreshing the button many times.”

It’s a far cry, one retiree observed, from the old days of the old Met – “when it was a more class-conscious thing, and people inherited season tickets.”

He smiled. “I’ll have to remember the Met in my will.”

The Met plans two more open houses: “Hansel and Gretel” on Dec. 21 and “La Fille du Régiment” on April 18.

barbarba.hoffman@nypost.com