Yangon faces many urgent challenges in the drive to make up for 50 years of isolation and neglect. Sewers, street lights, public transport, traffic flow, affordable housing, heritage conservation, and so much more all require immediate attention. But on Valentine’s Day 2014, an opera lover can perhaps indulge a more frivolous interest.

As Yangon turns into an international zone, relating to the rest of Myanmar much as New York does to the rest of America, its cultural resources are looking increasingly threadbare. Certainly the local scene is vibrant. But any cosmopolitan city also needs to draw in culture from outside, and that is happening only in limited ways. A few Hollywood blockbusters are now screened alongside regional staples, and foreign institutes stage isolated events. Beyond that, not much.

New York’s pioneering Metropolitan Opera offers one quick and easy way to plug the gap. Currently, the Met beams world-class opera to nearly 2000 cinemas in 64 countries, and has a global audience of three million. A screened season typically comprises 10-12 productions priced at around $20 a ticket. Adding Myanmar to the list would surely be simple.

For the Met to succeed in Yangon, though, it needs to sharpen its act. In cities not too many time zones from New York, Met Opera is streamed live and necessarily follows the rhythm of the actual show. In Asia, real-time screening is not possible and tapes are sent instead. Yet the full Lincoln Center schedule is still adhered to. The result is that in the Met’s 2013-14 season even the recorded version of Giacomo Puccini’s Tosca, a two-hour opera, takes three hours 40 minutes to screen.

Some of the material making up the additional 100 minutes is reasonable. Brief messages from sponsors merit a place, for they reduce ticket prices. Quick interviews with principal singers can enhance the operatic experience. But the Met’s Tosca also includes scenes from the rehearsal room (Giuseppe Verdi’s comic Falstaff in the middle of Puccini’s tragic masterpiece), an irrelevant Charlie Rose interview, and two 20-minute scene-changing segments.

Met Opera in Yangon would have to dispense with all this, for it would kill off audiences before they’d even begun to build. If a taped Tosca can’t be screened in two hours 30 tops, it shouldn’t be screened at all.