Interview: Lauren Worsham

The limitless Lauren Worsham.
Photos from laurenworsham.com.

It’s hard to imagine two works more dissimilar than Victor Herbert’s Babes in Toyland and David T. Little and Royce Vavrek’s Dog Days, but on April 27, when Master Voices performs Toyland in concert at Carnegie Hall, one woman will connect the two. Soprano Lauren Worsham — whose shattering performances as Lisa in Dog Days rank among the finest I have ever seen — will take the ingénue role of Jane. She may not yet be the music-theater equivalent of Kevin Bacon, the necessary link to everything and everyone, but give her time.

Her limpid, vibrant voice commands attention, and she knows how to use it to project the kind of innocence that’s equally appropriate in Little’s Dystopia and Herbert’s Toyland. Already she’s excelled in operetta at New York City Opera and, on Broadway, in an acclaimed turn as Phoebe in A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder, warbling her heart out and picking up Drama Desk and Theatre World awards and a Tony nomination. She runs an opera company, the Coterie, and is the lead singer in Sky-Pony — a rock band — while also appearing in concert and in cabaret. To this observer, it seems there’s nothing that doesn’t interest her, and nothing she can’t do.

“I definitely try to do many things,” Worsham says, calling herself “a jack-of-all-trades and not necessarily a master of any of them.” (I beg to disagree.) “How did I get to the point where I can? I think it was more that I decided that I wanted to. I didn’t want to focus on one thing. As with most things in my life, my path found me.”

“Mirror, Mirror”: As Lisa in Dog Days.
One of the most astonishing performances I have ever witnessed.

Growing up in Austin, Texas, Worsham sang the music that was in the air around her, rock and blues, and her first voice teacher was a blues musician. She also sang in her high-school choir, and her interest in musical theater led her to audition for a college production of Candide. After graduation from Yale (cum laude, because of course) and a stint in the first national tour of The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, she found herself playing Cunegonde again, this time in New York City Opera’s revival of Candide, in 2008.

Worsham had begun to broaden and deepen her understanding of opera, with which she’d been only somewhat familiar. But she says, “I love narrative and I love drama, and at that point opera wasn’t focusing on those things in the way that a college student would have been aware of.” In NYCO’s late, lamented VOX program for new work, Worsham met Little and Vavrek, who were about to change many people’s notions of narrative and drama in opera. “Dog Days is the greatest thing I’ve done, maybe the greatest thing I’ll ever do,” Worsham says — adding, “until the next time I work with David and Royce!”

For City Opera’s Candide, “They double-cast me with a more trained singer,” Worsham remembers. “They set me up with a voice teacher, and I credit her with helping me open up my classical voice.” This training strikes me as crucial to her multifaceted career: the desire to do many things and the talent to persuade people to allow you to do many things will take you only so far if you don’t have the technique to pull it off. (My hat is off to Worsham’s teacher, Virginia Grasso.)

In Gentleman’s Guide, with Jane O’Hare and Bryce Pinkham.

Worsham also respects “good vocal hygiene.” The main thing for me is not yelling in bars. [Presumably when she’s performing with Sky-Pony.] There’s a difference between doing something one night, or every night of the week. Everything requires a different kind of maintenance and paying attention to your body. I definitely learned that the hard way with Gentleman’s Guide.

“When I first started, I had a high, nasal speaking voice for Phoebe,” she continues. “For the first eight months, it was fine, but then it started to catch up with me. In the same way that if you woke up every morning and bend your knees, you’ll get more flexible, but if you sit at a desk all day, you’ll lose flexibility. Using that voice gave my larynx bad habits. I’d never done a show that many days a week for that long. There’s a difference between a long game and a short game.”

While Worsham’s rock voice doesn’t sound precisely like her operetta voice, it’s recognizably the same instrument, and just as irresistible. Her approach to any piece of music, she says, is rooted in character: “Different characters have different ways they carry their body and different ways they use their voice. Different songs have different characters and different textures. Sometimes it’s a choice: ‘This would sound good.’ When it comes to opera, that’s a matter of technique, but when it comes to something like pop music, a lot of the time for me it’s a matter of letting go, of trying to be ‘on the voice,’ just trying to tell the story.”

Rocking out with Sky-Pony.
Worsham’s husband, Kyle Jarrow, is also in the band.

Story-telling is always her principal concern, though “in opera I’m also focused on continuation of the voice and on technique.” Recalling her harrowing aria from Dog Days, she says, “In the same way that I think I wouldn’t be telling the story we’re trying to tell if I belted ‘Mirror, Mirror,’ singing pop songs with perfect technique and vowels wouldn’t tell the story that song wants to tell, in that sense.”

Master Voices likewise believes in “The Art of Musical Storytelling,” and Babes in Toyland has told many over the years. At the time of its premiere, in 1904, it was customary to change the materials in American operetta, to drop one number and add another, or to re-work a scene to suit a particular performer. As the two movie adaptations show, the material is highly flexible: there’s no Laurel and Hardy in Disney’s Toyland. But there’s not really an Ur-text, and Toyland hasn’t seen a major New York revival in generations. Master Voices artistic director Ted Sperling has prepared a score and, with Joe Keenan, cobbled together a script. “It’s hilarious,” Worsham says, comparing it to classic movie scripts. “Everyone seems to have some zingers … there’s no straight man.”

Sperling has assembled a spectacular cast for Toyland, led by another soprano who straddles both Broadway and opera, Kelli O’Hara. Jonathan Freeman adds another villain to his résumé (he’s played Aladdin’s Jafar in every medium you can name) with the role of Barnaby; and Jay Armstrong Johnson, a Broadway favorite who sang the title role in NYCO’s most recent revival of Candide, is Tom Tom, Jane’s love interest. And with the master clown Bill Irwin as the Toymaker and the irrepressible Christopher Fitzgerald as Alan, Jane’s brother, “I’ll be focusing on trying not to pee my pants with laughing,” Worsham says. “I’ve really got to be at the top of my game with those two.”

Is this the face that launched a thousand quips?
It will be on April 27.

The audience can expect “a lot of fun, more than anything. I’m looking forward to that,” Worsham says. “I think we need it. Gosh, reading the news every day, it seems as if a little escape is harder to get to these days.”

Master Voices presents Victor Herber’s Babes in Toyland in concert at Carnegie Hall, April 27 at 7:00 pm. For tickets and more information, click here.

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Interview: Tatiana Daubek & Gonzalo Ruiz on House of Time’s Upcoming Season

Quartet performance.

Twenty-five years ago, I interviewed the legendary Czech soprano Jarmila Novotná, and my essay about her led a few years ago to my meeting her granddaughter, violinist Tatiana Daubek. One happy consequence of that new association has been the opportunity to hear several concerts from House of Time, the chamber ensemble of which Tatiana is a founding member. The programs are consistently intriguing, presenting varied repertoire that combines rarities with more-familiar works in unfamiliar settings, played on period instruments. Oboist Gonzalo X. Ruiz has unlocked most of these treasures from “libraries and listening,” as he puts it, and he often provides lively commentary from the stage.

Each concert I’ve attended has found me by turns beaming, meditating, chuckling, and (once) crying. Trust me: they’re terrific. Now House of Time is gearing up for its third season here in New York, and preparing to venture into 20th-century repertoire. With the first concert looming on September 18, I sat down with Tatiana and Gonzalo to look at the time ahead — and the time gone by.

Quartet rest.

House of Time got started, Tatiana and Gonzalo recall, when they were invited to play for a private party. Their hosts “didn’t want random musicians,” Tatiana says; “they thought it would be much better to have a name.” Casting about for inspiration, they landed on “Cronologgia,” a play on words (“cronologia,” or “chronology,” “chronos,” or “time,” and “loggia,” or “dwelling”).

This appealed to them at first, because it would permit the group to perform music of several different periods. “Why have a name like ‘So-and-So Baroque’ when you’re doing 19th-century repertoire?” Tatiana says. But ultimately the group decided that “Cronologgia” “sounds like a disease,” and they settled on the English translation. “We liked having a name that lent itself to any repertoire, any style of music that we want to play.”

“I don’t like to put limits on what we do, in terms of dates,” Gonzalo says. “The main focus in the rest of our musical life is the 18th century. But we have been branching out, into the 17th century, a lot into the 19th century. At our first concert this season, we have our first 20th-century piece, and we’re planning a substantial late-20th-century piece for next season. It really is about paying attention to the music in its chronological context, rather than just mixing and matching. Not that we don’t combine periods, but if we do it’s probably for a reason.”

In his research, Gonzalo comes up with little-known material, some of which he isn’t sure had ever been performed before House of Time got to it. This season, the group will also perform new arrangements of Handel’s Il Pastor Fido and Rameau’s Zaïs, custom-made for the ensemble’s players.

“It’s a very Baroque approach to use the instruments you have around,” Gonzalo says. “We in the post-Romantics tend to think of orchestration as an intrinsic part of the piece. That’s certainly true for a lot of 18th-century repertoire, but by and large what we call orchestration was part of the performance, rather than intrinsic to the music. I like to take a piece of music and make it work for the instruments that we have.”

Gonzalo Ruiz,
photographed by Tatiana Daubek.
(Yes, she’s a photographer, too.}

Those instruments are of the period in which the music was written. Over the centuries, instruments have changed as music has changed, Gonzalo explains, recalling that, while a 21st-century pianist can figure out how to play an 18th-century harpsichord, he didn’t know what to do with a Baroque oboe the first time he got his hands on one: the instrument had evolved so much.

“Really, when you start focusing on older music, you want to play the older instrument,” Gonzalo says. “It’s like the way Blue Grass fans prefer acoustic to electric guitar. There’s a relationship between the art and the tools. Using the right tools doesn’t guarantee you anything, but it is a good start. …Music vanishes as soon as you make it, so the process is the product, in a sense. We feel more comfortable using those tools.”

Like Tatiana, Argentine-born Gonzalo has music in his genes. His father is a conductor, and while the family lived in Paris, he asked his own teacher, Nadia Boulanger, how to get little Gonzalo started in music. She declared that “C’est trop tard!” (It’s too late) for the boy, who hadn’t yet turned four. Smitten five years later with the sound of the oboe — confounding his father, who had hoped for the violin — little Gonzalo was taken to the conservatory, where he was told, “No, you’re too young, you’re too small, and the oboe class is full.”

Tears ensued, but alone the next day he rode his bicycle back to the conservatory to ask again, and his parents had to bring him home. When the oboe teacher heard this story, he contacted the Ruiz family and gave Gonzalo lessons on the sly, until the family moved to the U.S., and he pursued a more conventional education.

And then came the Baroque oboe. The more he learned, the more he realized that “I had a sound in my head that I wasn’t hearing in real life,” and that he found himself enjoying the sound of Baroque oboe-playing less than he enjoyed the sound of playing on other period instruments. “I’ve become more flexible in my tastes since then, but I started Baroque oboe-playing with a sense of mission: ‘There’s something to be done, and I may as well be the one to do it.’”

Today, he says, “There’s been a lot of progress and improvement in the Baroque oboe world, and I like to think that I’ve made my contribution to it.” His CV attests to that: he’s won accolades for performances with leading ensembles; he’s taught at Oberlin, the Longy School, and Juilliard, as well as many master classes; and his students now play with the best groups in the country. He’s got a Grammy nomination, and examples of his work are in the music collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The sound in Gonzalo’s head is now in the heads of a lot of other people.

Tatiana Daubek.

Tatiana started violin at the age of seven, “but I really found my calling and my teacher in high school.” She followed that teacher, Julia Bushkova, from the Interlochen Arts Academy to the University of North Texas, where she studied for another five years. Still, she says, “From the age of seven to fourteen, I also led a pretty normal kid life.” By the time she got to Interlochen, “I knew that music was very important to me, and I didn’t want to live without it in my life.”

Bushkova recommended that Tatiana study Baroque violin (“and that’s quite rare, coming from a Moscow Conservatory, traditional teacher,” Tatiana observes). The Baroque violin teacher at UNT was Cynthia Roberts, another important influence on her career. “Once I started playing some of the more obscure stuff, composers I hadn’t heard of and composers I had never played before, I thought, ‘Wow, this stuff is really good!’”

She obtained a graduate degree in “regular” violin from Boston University while continuing to study Baroque on the side, then got into Juilliard’s Baroque program, then just taking off. Her teacher there was Monica Huggett, the head of the new program, with whom Gonzalo has worked for 20 years. “She is a force of nature,” Tatiana says. “I feel like music radiates from her all the time. She just plays and doesn’t care what anyone thinks.”

Today House of Time also includes members Paul Dwyer (cello), Leon Schelhase (harpsichord), Avi Stein (harpsichord), and Beiliang Zhu (cello and viola da gamba), as well as “guest stars” for individual concerts. “The Venn diagram of our best friends and the best musicians we know has a huge overlap,” Gonzalo says. “So far, everybody that’s played in House of Time is somebody that we really like.”

He contrasts the group’s concerts with those in which instrumentalists are hired by a contractor, or orchestras “where your colleagues hopefully are friendly, but you didn’t have anything to do with it. We’re very picky about whom we invite to play with us.”

Working with people they know well makes performances more dynamic, it seems, as the players respond to one another. “I like the unpredictability, no matter how much you rehearse,” Gonzalo says. “As it’s going, you’re like following a thread, not an exact road map. There’s just too many things to react to.”

“And every person that’s onstage obviously will create a different road map each time,” Tatiana agrees.

Also unlike other chamber groups, which tour and play in other group’s concert series, Gonzalo says, “We are focused on building our own audience and putting on our own concerts here in New York.”

“We’re bumping up the level every year,” Tatiana says. “Every season we’re that much better prepared, we have that much more visibility, and our audience is still growing.” They’ve just released a (gorgeous) CD of works by François Couperin and Marin Marais, and they’re pleased, too, with the success of a recent Kickstarter campaign, which means that the upcoming season is nearly in the black already.

“In some ways, we still are kind of doing everything ourselves,” Tatiana says, and Gonzalo has learned that, “when I try to wear too many hats, I do something terribly wrong.” Tatiana’s lesson has been, “Don’t wait ‘til the last minute. …Things always take more time than you expect. But that’s sort of true everywhere.” Even in the House of Time.

To purchase tickets and more information on House of Time’s upcoming season, visit the ensemble’s website, here.

Tatiana appears in Joyce DiDonato’s music video for NPR, recorded at the historic Stonewall Inn — and I appear, too, seated just behind Tatiana. This photo was taken just after the wrap.

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Interview: Caroline Worra on ‘The Long Walk’

Soprano Caroline Worra:
The Champion of New Opera.

Though I first heard her in Verdi, soprano Caroline Worra has over the years earned a sterling reputation for new work, singing in premieres and near-premieres with opera companies across the United States. When Mark Adamo’s Little Women opened at Glimmerglass, there was Caroline Worra, who managed to make Amy (my least-favorite March sister) appealing and sympathetic. When Fort Worth Opera brought Tom Cipullo’s Glory Denied to the stage, there was Caroline Worra again, bringing life to a modern-day Penelope whose husband’s long wartime odyssey cost them both all that they shared.

I started to count up the contemporary roles in her repertory — The Mines of Sulphur, Lizzie Borden, and Orphée, just off the top of my head, and there are lots of others — but ultimately, it’s not about numbers. To everything she does, Caroline Worra brings clarity: she lets nothing stand between her and her audience, spinning her stories with irresistible immediacy of expression. No matter how difficult or surprising the music, her message comes across.

With Opera Saratoga this summer, Worra will sing three roles in another world premiere, Jeremy Howard Beck’s The Long Walk, an adaptation of Iraqi War veteran Brian Castner’s coming-home memoir. From workshops and sing-throughs to opening night, Worra has been involved in The Long Walk at every step: in fact, “The entire cast has stayed with the project for two years, which is incredible,” she says. “We generally don’t get this kind of luxury.”

The Long Walk’s cast also includes Daniel Belcher, Heather Johnson, Donita Volkwijn, David Blalock, Javier Abreu, and Justin Hopkins. Two years ago, the company assembled to work through about half the opera, with only piano and an electric guitar for accompaniment. “The next year, it was a little bit longer,” Worra says, “and this past March, we read it again with the full orchestration. To be with a piece for this long, in these crucial stages of existence, has been a treat for all of us.”

As Older Alyce in Glory Denied
(with Sydney Mancasola as Younger Alyce in background).
Photo by Ellen Appel, courtesy of Fort Worth Opera.

Opera isn’t Broadway, and until recently workshopping has been a rare practice, but it’s an important part of the process for Lawrence Edelson and American Lyric Theater, who commissioned The Long Walk. “I’ve been a part of so many world premieres,” Worra says, “and quite often you get to the venue, and the score is completely published, and it is what it is. And quite often, once you’re into the production space, it’s too late for cuts and edits.” But for The Long Walk, even now that rehearsals have begun, composer Beck, his librettist, Stephanie Fleischmann; stage director David Schweizer, and conductor Steven Osgood “have continued to work together to make sure they are streamlining the piece and creating the correct amount of drama and the pulse for the crucial moments and the drive to the end.”

Perhaps needless to say, singers who can cope with this kind of ongoing editorial work — which may entail learning, un-learning, and re-learning words and music even as opening night approaches — must possess quick minds, first-rate musicianship, and generous, collaborative spirits. Caroline Worra began developing these qualities when she was still an undergraduate, earning her bachelor’s degree in piano. “I enjoy the technical aspect of being able to sing through and learn music that sometimes is almost more instrumental in nature,” as contemporary scores often are, she says. “I’ve found the challenge of taking things that maybe are written in a difficult manner and trying to make it just seem and feel and look and sound natural.”

The themes of Worra’s musical life came together when the piano major began to study voice with Costanza Cuccaro. Cuccaro’s husband, Edwin Penhorwood, is a composer who sometimes played for Worra’s lessons. Penhorwood has written extensively for his wife, and often shared his new work with her pupil. “It was great to be around a composer who was composing brand-new things all the time,” Worra says. “I loved that right away. [Composers] are creating new things, and it’s exciting to me.”

When she first heard Cuccaro sing, “I felt there was something so natural and clear about the way that she sang and the way that she communicated,” Worra says. “That’s what really inspired me to become a singer.” Today, Worra still aims to uphold her teacher’s “natural” expression, even in challenging vocal lines. “I think that’s actually what a lot of composers are trying to do, to write things that will sound natural,” she says. And the singing technique also informs Worra’s acting, because it “really lends itself to a sort of clarity of intent on the stage. This is what helps a lot of some of these roles that I get to do, to be able to rely on that technique that she taught me, so that I can have a very natural acting style.”

Even when she sings 19th-century opera,
it’s sometimes a world premiere:
As Gertrude in Faccio’s Amleto
with Opera Southwest, 2014.

When Cuccaro and Penhorwood left the University of Missouri for Indiana University, Worra followed them there, earning a doctorate in vocal performance, “to learn this craft, to just stay in a protected environment as long as I could,” she says, and she still studies with Cuccaro whenever she can. While in Bloomington, Worra minored in conducting. That study has given her rare insight into the conductor’s job, and as a result, “I enjoy that communication between the conductor and the singer,” Worra says. “That’s really crucial in those new works, when you’re creating things. The conductor and the singer are really dependent on each other.”

In The Long Walk, Worra sings three roles: Brian’s sister, in a birthday-party scene that shows the difficulty he’s facing as he adjusts to life at home; an Iraqi woman, “mourning and singing about how our children are dead, and how angry we are” in a “dramatic and terrifying” sequence; and Brian’s psychiatrist, who diagnoses him not with the post-traumatic stress disorder he’d supposed he had, but with “blast-induced traumatic brain injury,” a side-effect of the explosives he detonated as part of an Explosive Ordnance Disposal unit during the war. Receiving this diagnosis “helps him to the next stage of recovery,” Worra says. “If you know what’s wrong with you, you have a little more drive and hope, and you can try to recover into as much of a normal life as you can possibly have.”

By now, singing new music is normal life for Caroline Worra — The Long Walk isn’t even the first time she’s gotten to meet the real-life people she’s singing about. “I enjoy every second of getting to work on these new pieces,” she says. “I know how lucky we are to be able to do world premieres. Creating things that nobody has ever seen before is one of my absolute favorite things to get to do.”

Jeremy Howard Beck’s The Long Walk
Opera Saratoga
at the Spa Little Theater in Spa State Park
Saratoga Springs, NY
July 10 (world premiere) and 25 at 7:30 pm
July 13 and 17 at 2:00 pm
For more information and tickets, click here.

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Interview: Justin Hopkins on ‘The Road of Promise’

Bass-baritone Justin Hopkins.

Among the cast of the Collegiate Chorale’s upcoming U.S. premiere of Kurt Weill’s The Road of Promise, the name Justin Hopkins stands out. The bass-baritone will sing the role of the Dark Angel next week, and I first encountered him at Fort Worth Opera, in Glass’ Hydrogen Jukebox, in 2011, where he displayed a commanding voice, keen musicality, and the skill to deliver a long, emotional monologue — spoken, not sung — with more power than most stage actors his age could muster. To The Road of Promise Hopkins brings a couple of credentials that should serve him well: he’s a former winner of the Lotte Lenya Competition, sharing second place in 2012; and as a veteran of the Philadelphia Boys Choir, he knows his way around big choral works.

“I would not have had a career in music without my experience with the Boys Choir,” Hopkins said. “Number one, it established my love and appreciation for the music that I’m singing today.” He points to Britten’s War Requiem, which he’s just sung for the first time as a baritone soloist — but which was the first piece he performed with the Boys Choir, when he was nine years old. With the Philadelphia Orchestra and conductor Wolfgang Sawallisch, the Requiem made an impression, and Hopkins remembers being “astonished at the size and scope of this piece, and how it moved things.” He bought a recording of the piece and listened to it “over and over, while my friends were listening to God knows what. The fact that I performed the War Requiem all those years ago informed my performance this year.”

Hopkins also credits the choir’s director, Robert G. Hamilton, for instilling in him the discipline he’s needed to pursue a career in music, lessons he sums up as “You needed to be in constant focus and attention, but you needed to be passionate. I’ve taken that with me, and that informs my drive and my passion for performing today.” The choir also influenced Hopkins’ musical aesthetics. “Dr. Hamilton was in constant search of contemporary composers at the forefront of choral music,” Hopkins says, and the Boys Choir performed a wide-ranging repertory that embraced classical and modern works, as well as show tunes. “I had a great balance of new and old music from a young age,” Hopkins says, and this steered him toward an “ability to — not to grasp but just to engage in both forms.”

That said, modern and contemporary works often address subjects that are more immediate and accessible to him. He cites the War Requiem, which incorporates Wilfred Owen’s poetry from World War I and recalls World War II, in which Hopkins’ grandfather fought; Hydrogen Jukebox takes on a variety of contemporary politics and mores. Hopkins’ upcoming engagement, the world premiere of Jeremy Howard Beck’s The Long Walk at Opera Saratoga, tells of a soldier’s return home from the war in Iraq. These themes offer “an easier or more direct route to identify with the music” and help “to conjure up the emotional relationship” more than is sometimes true of older pieces.

In Hydrogen Jukebox.
Fort Worth Opera, 2011. Photo by Ron T. Ennis.

The Road of Promise offers a modern look at ancient stories, since Weill’s librettist, Franz Werfel, uses tales from the Bible to respond to the persecution of Jews under the Nazis. Hopkins grew up in Mount Airy, Pennsylvania, an exceptionally integrated community where he had Jewish friends (“I attended a lot of bar mitzvahs and bat mitzvahs”) and tried to learn more about their heritage. Discovering the horrifying history of the Shoah, he could on some level relate that legacy to the African–American experience of slavery and diaspora, he says, locating “a common bond … of racism and oppression.” Now he points to the “great sense of kinship and brotherhood between the two communities,” especially during the early years of the civil rights movement. “The relationship of African–Americans and Jewish–Americans in the United States is very important… I’m actually sad to see that the relationship doesn’t exist as much as it did in the past.”

Kurt Weill himself wrote one of the principal artistic works reflecting the solidarity between Jews and blacks in the 1940s, Lost in the Stars, his final work for Broadway. A protest against South African racism, Lost in the Stars, held a clear message for America, and in 1950, the original production couldn’t go on national tour because it was impossible to secure lodging for black cast members. “It wasn’t that long ago,” Hopkins observes, and now the show’s title number has entered his repertory. “It resonates with audiences much in the way that ‘Ol’ Man River’ does,” he says. “He got it, Kurt Weill — and Kern and Hammerstein — they understood the plight of the community which they were writing about.” And because The Road of Promise incorporates stories that are a part of Hopkins’ own faith, “I feel as if I am able to relate to it on an emotional level that much more.”

For The Road of Promise, Hopkins will be working with conductor Ted Sperling, whom he admires as a performer and as a role model of sorts. “He’s so fluent in so many genres,” and Hopkins would like to see his own career follow a similar path. “I love opera, very obviously, and I love oratorio, in concert performances. I love drama … and I would love to be regarded as a versatile performer who seems as at home on the opera stage as he does on the concert platform and in the musical theater and on the theatrical stage. I’d love to be a jack-of-all-trades, because I love it all. Given the opportunity, I have something unique to offer in each of those areas.” He’ll get no argument from me.

Collegiate Chorale presents
Kurt Weill’s The Road of Promise
Carnegie Hall
May 6 at 8:00
May 7 at 7:00
Click HERE for information and tickets.

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Interview: Ryan Mercy & Christopher Barnes on Unauthorized! The Musical Parody

The (extremely) creative team: Barnes & Mercy

Watching That ’80s Time Travel Movie, the premiere production in the Unauthorized! Musical Parody series at New York’s People’s Improv Theater last fall, I’d never have guessed that the show had been written, cast, rehearsed and produced in barely one month — for one night only. From the polished young cast to the infectious score to the ingenious staging, I had every reason to believe I’d wandered into an Off-Broadway hit that had been running at least three months. Subsequent shows — Steel Petunias and Ghostcatchers, likewise written and produced in just a month each — confirmed my impression. Sure, you gotta get a gimmick, but this wasn’t mere gimmickry. Something special was going on here. Cheering audiences and a sold-out box office obviously agreed with me.

As of last Friday, the Unauthorized! shows have begun playing in repertory at the PIT, with new shows slated to enter the cycle over the next several months. Each will parody a beloved Hollywood movie, each will be assembled in about five weeks, most are expected to feature what’s become an ad-hoc rep company of actors, and all are written by composer Ryan Mercy and lyricist Christopher Barnes, who also directs, and produced by Ronny Pascale.

“We’re calling it musical-theater boot camp,” Mercy says, and Barnes agrees. “We just watched the Sondheim documentary [Six by Sondheim], and he said the way you learn is to write something, then put it up,” Barnes says. With other original material, they’d been through workshops; valuable though those experiences were, they culminated in readings, not fully staged productions. Lacking high-profile connections, Mercy and Barnes had begun to despair of ever getting their big break. Now they’re refining their artistic goals and discovering what does and doesn’t work for an audience.

Because that audience votes on the source material for the next show, Barnes compares the experience to TV’s Project Runway, “because these aren’t shows we would have wanted to write, and yet we’re finding our voices and finding our passion. It’s like, ‘Okay, show writers, this week you have to write Ghostbusters, make it work.’”

All-singing! All-dancing! All-time-traveling!
The cast of That ’80s Time Travel Movie

That said, the team hedges its bets a little by proposing movies they actually like for the audience to vote on. Their affection for the material shows. After That ’80s Time Travel Movie, Barnes remembers, “one compliment we got was that there was nothing mean about what we did. I think it’s because we love the movie. We try to basically take what we love about a movie and put it on the stage.”

Given the extraordinary proliferation of movie-based musicals on New York stages in recent years — when even documentaries like Grey Gardens and Hands on a Hardbody wind up (brilliantly) on Broadway — the practice Mercy and Barnes are getting at the PIT could come in handy, and it was Pascale who suggested they give movie parodies a try. “I don’t think we ever watch a movie without thinking, ‘Oh, that should be a musical,’” Barnes says, and Mercy adds, “I think a painter paints and we write musicals. We’re always thinking in the vocabulary of musical theater. It’s in our blood.”

Each show has posed its own challenges. That ’80s Time Travel Movie not only brings a DeLorean to the stage, it turns the car into a singing, dancing character. Ghostcatchers raised the thorny questions of how to spoof a spoof, and how to make a musical out of a story in which the characters don’t experience emotions “too strong to express in words,” Mercy says. “It was up to us to find moments where there was enough dramatic tension for a song to erupt.”

Steel Magnolias contains one obvious moment for a song: M’Lynn’s emotional breakdown at the funeral of her daughter, Shelby. The scene earned Sally Field an Oscar nomination, but the Unauthorized! team was “terrified that the audience wouldn’t go to that sad place after all that silliness,” Barnes says. They were prepared to cut the number if it didn’t work in performance. But on opening night, there was scarcely a dry eye in an audience that, seconds earlier, had been howling at the catty comedy and Southern-fried parody scenes.

“It’s surprising when people say, ‘Oh, I can’t wait to see how you make fun of Sally Field in her breakdown.’ For us, that’s too easy,” Mercy says. “Why would we make fun of that? Why would we be negative about a scene in classic cinema? We want to put our own stamp on it. Without plagiarizing!”

Shelby, drink your juice!
The women of Steel Petunias

Revisiting their scripts in preparation for the repertory revivals, the authors are making improvements. Steel Petunias ran long, and “for the first run, we just threw everything to the wall to see what would stick,” Mercy admits. “We flailed a little bit to figure out song moments for that one, but now I’m very confident that every song in that show is necessary and a good choice.” “I do believe that anybody who saw the first two-and-a-half-hour show, if they were a Steel Magnolias fan, they got a good show,” Barnes says. “But now we’ve got it where anybody can enjoy it.”*

They’re learning that “What makes the show is what’s necessary,” not what they think audiences will expect from a popular film. “We try to basically take what we love about a movie and put it on the stage,” Barnes says, and that approach involves less outright mockery and more “heightening,” as he and Mercy call it. For example, when their Marty McFly realizes that his mother is coming on to him, he’s not merely freaked out, he nearly throws up, ulping steadily for an entire scene. Mercy’s music steers the audience to the right response to a given scene, too, whether it’s Doc Brown’s rap number or M’Lynn’s extended scena.

It helps to have talented actors to put across their material. Barnes and Mercy were bartenders at the PIT, not bigshots, yet when they posted the audition for That ’80s Time Travel Movie, they fielded what Barnes calls “an all-star cast, right from the start,” and many have returned for more than one show. Most have a background in improv and sketch comedy, which proves a boon in several ways. Since most cast members are working on multiple shows simultaneously, rehearsal time is limited and plenary attendance is rare. Quick wits can cover a flubbed line in ways the audience will never notice (one reason I could believe they’d been performing the play for months); and sketch actors can take a line of direction like “stand there,” and “make it look like it makes sense,” Barnes says, “which is crazy.”

The actors are “also calm in a way that’s really nice,” Mercy says. “We’re the ones who freak out about our timeline, and they’re so used to putting on a show in three days that they’re like, ‘Oh, relax, we’ve got plenty of time.’” Moreover, cast member Adrian Sexton marvels, “Everybody likes each other, everybody gets along.”

Let’s hope I’m not jinxing anything by publishing that. It’s a team of champions and I hate to single out anybody — but so far I’ve been especially impressed by the versatility shown in multiple roles by Sexton, Kathleen Armenti, Julie Feltman, Dana Shulman, Jane Kehoe, Brian Hansbury, Aubrey Kyburz, Daniel Yawitz, and Kevin Sean, all of whom seem capable of fielding anything Mercy and Barnes throw their way. Though Matt Rogers, Stephanie Holmes, Pat Swearingen, Rachel Scherer, Jeff Scherer, and Kevin McLean haven’t appeared in quite as many roles, I’ve also found much to admire in their performances.

They fear no ghosts. Not even ghosts of critics.
The cast of Ghostcatchers.

Partners outside as well as inside the theater, Mercy and Barnes have had to learn to collaborate with others and to delegate. “We are control freaks,” Mercy says, “but we’re also on an insanely tight schedule, so it’s hard to outsource.” When Julia Darden offered to build several of the puppets for Ghostcatchers, Barnes “was fully prepared mentally to have to redo those puppets the night before the show,” he says. “But she did it in time, and they looked amazing.” Having proved herself with Steel Petunias, Shongedzai Matangira is “pretty much our go-to costume person now,” and she’s also played a lead role in Ghostcatchers and taken on some publicity duties, as well.

Perhaps their most valued collaborator is Christine Pynn. “Her title is production manager,” Mercy explains. “But really what she does for us is make sure the tech aspects of the show run smoothly.” Despite the limited lighting options, “She can do some amazing stuff from that booth,” Barnes observes, and the actors adore her.

Oh, and about those puppets. They’re part of Barnes’ translations of the movies’ special effects to the stage, using tricks that he calls “cheesy” or “geeky-dorky” but that bespeak his background in magic and are often breathtaking in their imagination. The DeLorean is one example, and the flaming tracks it leaves behind are another. The beloved Slimer of Ghostbusters is here a glorious glob of a slob made out of insulation foam and green paint. Steel Magnolias may not have had special effects, but Steel Petunias does, most notably a 15-foot-tall devil made out of old scripts and packing tape. (See photo below.)

There’s method in that magic. “When we saw Xanadu on Broadway, it was fun,” Barnes says, and like the Unauthorized! shows, Xanadu parodied a movie. “But I thought, ‘Why did I pay Broadway prices and there’s no spectacle, no giant disco ball?’”

“I would say Chris is a new generation P.T. Barnum,” Mercy adds. “I think he’s a showman before anything else. That’s where the magic background plays into it. If we’re going to put you in a room for an hour and a half, we want to give you a show that’s something you’re going to talk about.”

To learn more about Unauthorized! and upcoming performances, check Facebook or Instagram. You can also see the PIT’s complete roster of performances by clicking here.

Satan in the Bible Belt:
A scene from Steel Petunias.

*NOTE: I’m not at all a Steel Magnolias fan, yet I found Steel Petunias perfectly entertaining the first time around — and I’m looking forward to the revival.

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Interview: Jennifer Rivera on Rossini’s Sins

Mezzo-soprano Jennifer Rivera.

After Gioachino Rossini completed William Tell, in 1829, he never wrote another opera — thus crushing for all eternity the dreams of millions of mezzo-sopranos, for whom he’d created so many gratifying roles, but no more. “Retiring” to Paris until his death in 1868, the composer pursued his interests in good food and good company, bestowing his name on dishes that pleased him and reigning benevolently over much of Parisian society. And yet he was still a man who’d written 39 operas in 18 years. Music had seemed to bubble up from him irresistibly, like a natural spring of Champagne, and even in retirement, his source did not run dry. Little bits of musical invention kept slipping out: Les Pêchés de Vieillesse, he called them, “The Sins of Old Age,” occasional pieces to be played or sung primarily for the amusement of his friends.

Now Jennifer Rivera, one of the brightest mezzos of her generation, is turning to the Pêchés for a recital on Saturday, January 24, at the Abigail Adams Smith Auditorium, under the aegis of Salon/Sanctuary Concerts. This is a no-fooling, not-to-be-missed opportunity to hear a young artist whose Rossini singing has been praised by none other than Marilyn Horne: in one of my first conversations with that great lady, she bragged about Rivera and urged me to hear her whenever I could. It’s as if Abraham Lincoln told me whom to vote for. You just don’t argue with that.

“Picking some of Rossini’s French music was a must,” Rivera says, given the aims of the Salon/Sanctuary series and even the auditorium itself, which may look more like a ballroom than a Second Empire salon, but which is close enough in spirit to give audience members the sense that they’re hearing the music in the environment for which it was created.

Rossini, as the Parisians saw him.

Long before Rossini retired, Stendhal used the word “delightful” to describe his music, and the word applies to the Pêchés, as well. “These songs certainly don’t sound like they come from someone who has given up their craft,” Rivera says, answering a few questions by e-mail. “I guess what delights me about them is how full of character the ones I have chosen are, and what incredible contrast in style they demonstrate. Rossini is obviously a master at creating vocal drama — that is, he is able to create a sense of drama within the context of the vocal line, whether through acrobatics or beauty of melody. I know that well from his operatic writing, but it’s exactly the same type of very clear characterization in his song writing.”

A prodigiously early bloomer (as was Rossini himself), Rivera began singing leading roles with New York City Opera while she was still a student at Juilliard; I have particularly fond memories of her work in Hansel and Gretel and Chabrier’s L’Etoile. Among her other successes with NYCO was Rosina in Rossini’s Barber of Seville, also the vehicle for her debut with the Berliner Staatsoper. “I really first discovered Rossini when I was in high school, which is when I first started singing ‘Una voce poco fa’ and getting to know parts of Rosina (if you can believe it),” she says. Around the same time, she heard Marilyn Horne as Isabella in “Italian Girl in Algiers” at San Francisco Opera (“a very formative experience”) and, on video, Frederica von Stade as Angelica in Cenerentola. By now, Rivera has sung Rosina and Angelica many times, and she’s eager to sing Isabella, the first chance she gets. She looks exceptionally, almost disturbingly good in trouser roles, at which Rossini excelled, and so I’d like to hear her tackle a few of those, too.

Who’s a pretty boy, then?
As Nerone in Handel’s Agrippina.

Rivera first sang Rosina at the Juilliard Opera Center. Kenneth Merrill coached her and conducted that production, and “since that was my first leading Rossini lady, I really learned to sing that style of music from him,” she says. On Saturday night, Merrill will accompany her on piano, after a mishap waylaid the pianoforte he originally intended to use — “but I’m sure Ken will have just the right tough that will make the music feel in period on whatever instrument he is given. …We have never performed a recital together before now, so it is extremely fitting that we would be performing Rossini!”

In addition to Merrill, another of Rivera’s Rossinian mentors is Marilyn Horne, with whom she studied at the Music Academy of the West. I asked Rivera what Horne can teach the next generation. “I would say the biggest thing young singers can learn from listening to Marilyn’s recordings is about style,” she says. “She had a tremendous penchant for the clearest and most definitive version of bel canto style. A lot of Rossini singing today is of the ‘ha-ha’ ilk — that is, to put a small aspiration between each note for clarity. But Marilyn’s style was to retain the speed and clarity of the coloratura, yet in a true legato where there was no break between the notes.”

As Rosina in Central City, 2013.
Photo by Mark Kiryluk.

“While this other style can certainly be very exciting,” Rivera continues, “I think Marilyn truly embodies the basic nature of bel canto singing by always keeping the line, and by having an extraordinarily even sound from top to bottom. It’s the healthiest way to sing, and that’s a great lesson for any young singer. There will never be another person who possesses anything quite like Marilyn’s iconic sound, but the technical ease and style with which she dispatched all music, and particularly bel canto, is an ongoing master class to all who hear it.”

Saturday’s program will also feature songs by Pauline Viardot, who (like most of her family, including her sister, the legendary Maria Malibran) sang Rossini’s operas in her time and presided over a Parisian salon of her own. “As a composer, she was clearly very influenced by Rossini (and you can tell especially in her florid writing),” Rivera says, “but she also had her own voice. And it’s a treat to sing music composed by lyric mezzo by someone who possessed that exact voice type herself. I can’t imagine I’ll have another occasion to write that sentence.”

Oh, don’t ask why: Rivera as Weill’s Bessie.
Photo by Richard Termine,
courtesy of Gotham Chamber Opera.

I last saw Rivera in Gotham Chamber Opera’s Baden-Baden 1927, a re-imagining of the quadruple-bill of one-acts that included Weill’s Mahagonny Songspiel. As Weill’s whiskey-bar-seeking Bessie and as the cunning Nurse in Toch’s Princess and the Pea, Rivera once again proved herself an extraordinarily expressive artist, with a rich, supple, immensely appealing instrument, at once dark and lustrous. In repertoire that ranges from Handel to Jorge Martín, from Early Music to half an hour ago, Rivera represents the kind of versatile, intellectually curious, artistically adventurous American singer I admire so much. She’s also a fine writer whose essays for the Huffington Post are acclaimed and passed along by other young singers, confirming her status as a leading voice of her generation in one more way. And she takes her writing as seriously as her music, doing actual reporting and interviews to get the latest on the attempts to revive New York City Opera, for example. (Professional journalists aren’t covering the story nearly as well.) Since NYCO’s demise, her New York appearances have been all-too rare — one more reason to rush to hear her on Saturday.

Salon/Sanctuary Concerts present
Rossini in Paris
Jennifer Rivera, mezzo-soprano
Kenneth Merrill, piano
Saturday, January 24, 8:00
Abigail Adams Smith Auditorium
417 East 61st Street, New York
For more information, click here.

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Interview: Jonathan Cake on ‘More Between Heaven and Earth’

Jonathan Cake

“Whenever I’m called upon to do something that’s absolutely alien to me, I’m thrilled,” says Jonathan Cake. “This is one of the great privileges of being an actor: people will open a door that had been locked to you and give you the privilege of going through and looking around.”

On Sunday, January 18, Cake ventures into new territory with More Between Heaven and Earth, an environmental, multi-disciplinary performance piece that’s become one of the principal calling-cards of Salon/Sanctuary Concerts. Written and directed by Erica Gould, the piece reveals the relationship between Thomas Jefferson and the painter Maria Cosway, through their correspondence, through the music they heard together, and through music that Cosway herself wrote. Singing actress Melissa Errico reprises the role of Cosway, and once again soprano Jessica Gould and tenor Tony Boutté will join her at New York City’s historic Fraunces Tavern — where Jefferson wrote some of his letters to Cosway. Christen Clifford will narrate the performance, which starts at 4:00 PM.

Though Cake says he listens to quite a lot of the music of his own time, “I have absolutely no relationship with Classical music, absolutely nil,” he admits. The prospect of hearing music of Jefferson’s time, as Jefferson heard it, “was absolutely delicious to me and un-turn-down-able. The strangeness of the unknown!” He’s especially eager to hear Cosway’s music. “That must have been a gift, to be able to write a piece of music for such an intimidating man, who was himself a musician. …It seems an extraordinary act of love, to write a piece of music for somebody else.”

Melissa Errico as Maria Cosway
At Fraunces Tavern, December 2013.
Costumes by Deborah Houston.
Photo courtesy of Salon/Sanctuary Concerts.

Just learning more about Jefferson is part of the adventure for Cake, an English native and graduate of Cambridge. “I have to say to my shame that I knew not nearly enough” about him, Cake says. He ticks off the “basic facts”: “the third President and one of the Founding Fathers, and his extraordinary political and philosophical catholicism, and how interested and interesting he was about all sorts of extraordinary things and what a polymath he was. How he’s been claimed by the Left and the Right over the years, and yet he was entirely unique in himself as a man and in his own mind.”

Jefferson’s philosophical concerns — and their immediate impact on the establishment of religious freedom in the fledgling United States — are a principal focus of More Between Heaven and Earth, and in Gould’s script, Jefferson’s deepening involvement in government takes a toll on his relationship with Cosway. Cake says he’s coming to understand “that the public and the private were indivisible, that what the statesman was expressing was what the private person really believed, in all its conflicting ways and its brilliantly complicated ways. It wasn’t watered-down or filtered. It wasn’t politically expedient.”

Source of fascination: Jessica Gould and Tony Boutté sing arias Jefferson and Cosway enjoyed.
Costumes by Deborah Houston.
Photo courtesy of Salon/Sanctuary Concerts.

Seen at Fraunces Tavern just over a year ago (with Campbell Scott as Jefferson), More Between Heaven and Earth so clearly portrays the link between Jefferson’s public and private selves that the presence of Maria Cosway becomes a tantalizing source of speculation and regret. Especially in Errico’s luminous, beautifully sung portrayal of her — profoundly intelligent, gifted, and wise — one sees Cosway’s potential to make Jefferson a better person and a better leader.

Yet even as he got to know Cosway, Jefferson had begun his troubling relationship with his slave, Sally Hemings. And as Errico observed in a conversation with me after the 2013 performance, Cosway didn’t necessarily stand up to the men in her life. A Catholic, already married (unhappily) when she met Jefferson, Cosway couldn’t divorce her husband and run off with another man — no matter how much we’d want her to. Able to do little to improve her own lot, Cosway late in her life blazed a trail for others by founding a school for young women.

A veteran of the Royal Shakespeare Company, Cake first came to my attention in his Broadway debut, as Jason in Euripides’ Medea, opposite Fiona Shaw, in 2002, “a lifetime ago,” Cake says. “I’m so happy it still exists strongly in people’s memories. It’s rare that I’m in New York and someone doesn’t say something about that show.” Despite sometimes playing to less-than-full houses in the course of a limited run, “It’s become one of those shows that it seems everyone saw,” he says, adding, “It certainly didn’t seem that way at the time!”

Cake with Fiona Shaw as Medea, 2002.
Please note: I really did see this show.

Endowed with a frankly seductive speaking voice and a rugby-honed physique, Cake can tackle just about any role, and he’s compiled an enviable variety of credits on stage, film, on television, in Britain and in the States, performing in everything from the classics to Desperate Housewives — but thus far very, very little musical theater. “Like most people, I think I do [sing],” he says, “though other people might completely disagree…. I’m getting to the age where all sorts of things deserve to be invested in. So I would love to have a go at musical theater, and I would love to try to fool someone into giving me the opportunity.”

While he won’t sing as Jefferson, “There’s something about being next to a live orchestra and hearing it produce the sound that it does for the first time, that is absolutely magical. It plays such a huge part in this piece.” Performing any piece for the first time often entails “a strange magic,” he says, and in this case, he expects that the newness of the experience, when “strange and slippery things are drifting past you as fast as you’re doing it,” will help to bring out “the really lovely, fragile beauty of their relationship.”

Errico as Cosway.
Costumes by Deborah Houston.
Photo courtesy of Salon/Sanctuary Concerts.

Ultimately, Cake says, More Between Heaven and Earth — “not quite theater, not quite musical, it’s all of that, and of enormous historical significance” — represents the kind of “ambitious, uncategorizable pieces that go on in New York … a sort of cultural blessing.” “In The New Yorker, there’s a little section I always read called ‘Above and Beyond.’ This fits perfectly into The New Yorker’s ‘Above and Beyond.’”

Salon/Sanctuary Concerts Presents
More Between Heaven and Earth
Script and Stage Direction by Erica Gould
Program Concept and Music Research by Jessica Gould
Fraunces Tavern
54 Pearl Street, New York City
January 18, 4:00
For more information, click here.

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Interview: Isabel Leonard on Kapilow’s ‘Gertrude McFuzz’

One of the more eagerly heralded recordings of this holiday season is Rob Kapilow’s Polar Express and Gertrude McFuzz, concert adaptations of the beloved books written and illustrated by Chris Van Allsburg and Dr. Seuss (respectively, of course). Aiming to engage young audiences with music that’s fun but not dumb, Kapilow has composed lively scores with plenty of appeal for grownups, too, and he mixes child singers (a chorus in Polar Express, a preternaturally red-hot jazz-baby soloist named Olivia Lombardi in Gertrude) with Opera World grown-ups Nathan Gunn (in Polar Express) and Isabel Leonard (in Gertrude).

Especially when seen in excerpts on video, Leonard’s performance really makes you wish you could just bring her home and let her do her stuff for you. She’s a busy woman, of course, so in all likelihood you’ll have to settle for buying the album. But it’s spectacular work in any case. Even having seen her as Rossini’s Cinderella with Fort Worth Opera in 2009, and as Mozart’s Cherubino at the Met this fall (among other roles), I was only barely prepared for the wit and charm — and vivid acting — she brings to bear as Gertrude’s Narrator.

“Rob created a very fun, funky, musically narrative score for the book,” Leonard told me in a phone interview several weeks ago. “It’s perfect for kids, and that’s what this whole CD is about, not only bringing classical music to kids but bringing classically trained voices who can do a variety of things with their voices, to show kids what’s possible.”

Mezzo Isabel Leonard

For Leonard, the Gertrude score represented an opportunity “to play with my voice, to sing in a classical style and maybe in a more musical-theater style and jazzy style … a combination of colors and different styles,” she says. “Sometimes when you’re entrenched in the opera world, you forget what it is that you can do, in general. I’ve done jazz and musical theater, and it was great to put it all together.”

Renowned as the host of NPR’s What Makes It Great?, Kapilow has adapted Dr. Seuss before — his Green Eggs and Ham is widely considered a contemporary classic — and he has a pretty good idea what makes Seuss great. His music exults in the author’s imaginative use of language, and, much though we love the illustrations in the book, Kapilow rises to the challenge of substituting sound for image. He provides his own ingenious surprises, characters and curlicues and improbable landscapes, until we feel as if we’re listening to the pictures.

“[Kapilow’s] vocal writing has a range, so the singer has to have range and good rhythm, good funk in your voice,” Leonard says. “I was able to do that, and play around with accents and being goofy, and really, really telling the story, not just by way of beauty — which is what you hear so much in opera — but even more with the texture of sounds and words.”

Both Polar Express and Gertrude McFuzz are a particularly effective kind of composition for young audiences. They’re not didactic, explaining what a woodwind is; instead, they’re exemplary. These pieces demonstrate an original way to tell a story, and they showing that music isn’t just for Wotans and Valkyries and venerable conductors with great profiles, because kids can take part, too. You wind up with gateways to more and more music — which will seem less intimidating, because kids already have a sense of the potential pleasures and rewards.

As a parent — and as a former child — Leonard describes music education as “paramount, just like any arts education,” and she’s worked with children and young adults many times. “They’re still at that stage where they’re an open book: they can be inspired, and they’re still willing to be inspired,” she says. As audiences, kids “respond to something that’s true, their response is very genuine. It’s something they don’t forget, so they’re impacted on a level that really lives with them, for the rest of their life, most likely.”

Gertrude McFuzz does contain a moral — and wouldn’t we all like to be smart enough to know what’s enough? But Leonard was smart enough to have a good time with Kapilow’s score. “You can’t go far from the microphone” in the recording studio, she says, “but I was definitely rocking it out and having fun. It’s that kind of music. It’ll get little kids and older kids up on their feet, bouncing around and having fun with it.”

The Polar Express/Gertrude McFuzz album is available now from Amazon.com, in plenty of time for holiday giving.

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The Haushofmeister’s Diary, Part 17: Talking with Michael Mayes

Michael Mayes as Older Thompson in Glory Denied.
Fort Worth Opera Festival 2013.
Photo courtesy of Ellen Appel.

Especially with the severe military crew-cut he got to sing the lead in Tom Cipullo’s Glory Denied with Fort Worth Opera this season, Michael Mayes looks like the kind of guy who used to beat me up for liking opera. A native of Cut and Shoot, Texas (yes, there is such a place), he wears cowboy boots, listens to country music, and played high-school football. He’s still a big bruiser, and yet he’s not a bully but a baritone, one more of the people in Fort Worth who have changed my understanding of the possibilities — and the realities — of a community centered around the very music that used to isolate me in this state.

Mike is currently singing the role of the Older Jim Thompson Glory Denied, the story of an American P.O.W. in Vietnam and the devastating effects of the war on his marriage, his body, and his soul. The score calls on him to roar in rage and frustration — he’s terrifying — and yet he also delivers arias of celebration and forgiveness with some of the most tenderly lyrical singing I’ve heard. All the while, he’s wincing from the blows of his captors, or staggering in drunkenness, or halting in the aftermath of a stroke.

Though he’s sung plenty of standard-rep roles, such as Don Giovanni and Escamillo, with companies throughout the United States, Glory Denied is hardly Mike’s first foray into contemporary opera: he lists among his credits Richard Danielpour’s Margaret Garner and Jake Heggie’s Dead Man Walking; in Fort Worth last season, he sang Kinesias in Mark Adamo’s Lysistrata.

While we’ve gotten to know each other only in the past month, Mike’s reputation preceded him. He’s a born raconteur — at full throttle, he dials his Texas accent up to 11, at least — and he inspires a cult-like following in the companies where he sings, not least for whatever workout regimen he’s pursuing at the moment.

On the morning that George Jones’ death was announced, Mike met me for coffee and talked a bit about Glory Denied and the power of opera to affect all kinds of communities.

Michael Mayes, Baritone from Texas.

Michael Mayes: I actually got the contract [for Glory Denied] before my contract here last year [for Lysistrata]. Darren had offered me Lysistrata right after Dead Man Walking, when I did the Motorcycle Cop and Moralès in Carmen [in 2011].

I was trying to sing for Darren forever, because the company is important to me and this area is important to me. I have a lot of family in the area. I kept trying to sing for him, but my allergies would be bad, or I would be sick. The first time I got to sing for him was here, when I moved to the suburbs of North Dallas with my ex-wife. He said, “I love you but I’ve already cast this season, except for these small roles” in Dead Man Walking and Carmen. It was a great introduction; the small roles weren’t high pressure.

At the time they were shooting a pilot for a reality show. They gave me a camera and I got a lot of good footage. It sort of embedded me in the culture of Fort Worth Opera.

[For the 2013 festival] Darren had me originally in a different production, and he said, “I’ve got this new project that’s come across my desk, and just from where you’re going with your career, I think this would be much better for you.” He told me about the project, and I said, “Yeah, that’s about right.” Just from him telling me the story, I knew, no matter what the score looked like, I would be interested. It would be meaningful.

I’m into opera that’s meaningful and has a purpose, beyond pretty music. I think opera is a great agent for cultural change. That’s the way it used to be viewed: revolutionary, exciting, new, dangerous. I like it that way; it’s much more fun.

Q: Darren says that when he’s looking at a score, it isn’t enough for it simply to be new. He wants a new opera to provoke conversations within the community.

MM: That’s exactly what this does. We’ve seen a lot of movies and books on the Vietnam War, but not too many operas based on it. Opera has taken on the subject of war but used it as a plot device, or like Daughter of the Regiment, a comic thing. But there hasn’t been an unflinching look at this problem we have. We have these boys who come back riddled with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and say, “All right boys, get back to work.” Especially at the time this took place, no one even know what PTSD was.

The older Thompson recalls his younger self (David Blalock) in captivity, of which the younger Alyce (Sydney Mancasola) was unaware.
Glory Denied, Fort Worth Opera Festival 2013.
Photo courtesy of Ellen Appel.

I knew this piece would speak to so many people, and would be an effective tool for restoration and healing for people of a particular generation. At every single one of these talkbacks [following each performance of Glory Denied], that’s who stays and talks. It’s like they haven’t talked about it in a long time, they’ve relegated it to memory, this forgotten time that seems so long ago — but it’s really not. People were really affected by this time, and they get tears in their eyes, saying it’s wonderful to see that people are still talking about it and still care about it.

When I do projects like this, it makes what I do seem important, as opposed to doing it for myself to get a bunch of praise or entertain a bunch of rich people. This piece will reach anybody, anywhere. I don’t care whether they’ve ever seen an opera before.

I think that’s what we all want. More and more people are going into this business now not because they want to be big stars and sing pretty music. People are fired up. Just like in Glory Denied, the piece took place in an era of huge cultural change, and we’re going through another cultural change since 2001: this country, you almost don’t recognize it. Being a part of something that makes you feel like you’re part of the Zeitgeist or the landscape of cultural change — that’s exciting.

With Kirstin Chavez in Dead Man Walking.
Tulsa Opera.
Photo courtesy of Barihunks Blog.

After I did Dead Man Walking in Tulsa, a woman posted on Facebook, “That was so beautiful, you sang so well, and you’re a really good actor.” I’m not arrogant, but you hear those things a lot. And you say, “Oh, thank you so much.” Then she got to the next paragraph and said, “My daughter was murdered eight years ago, and your performance of Joseph Desrochers changed the way I think about the way I think about the man who murdered my daughter.”

I don’t care how many Giovannis you do, or Iago or Rigoletto, you’re going to affect people, but when you take a piece like this or like Dead Man Walking, you get people and yank ’em by the throat, shake ’em up and say, “Hey, this stuff ain’t dead. It’s living and it can affect people.” I think it’s one of the most effective ways to reach out and move people emotionally.

People think I’m crazy. I’ll say without any apology, they ask me about doing new work and how do you like it as opposed to standard opera? Hey, I love that stuff, it’s great. I’m doing Rigoletto this year at Boston Lyric, that’s my dream. I’m actually turning down a smaller role in a modern opera, because it’s my dream role to do Rigoletto. I still love these pieces. But I understand that during the time that a lot of these classical pieces were being written, they were the revolutionary new things that were going on the scene. People were still performing the classics, but I think we forgot about that. There are so many good stories in this country. We can reach whole new audiences, theater audiences.

Q: I’ve noticed that new work often attracts more theater-going audiences. Do you feel any special compunction to act better?

MM: Oh, yeah. For so long the opera professional was treated as some sort of freak, you know. It was enough to have them stand up and put on their little dog and pony show, and that was enough. I mean, “Wow, that’s an amazing voice, it’s loud and it’s doing all these melismas, and using the language I’m not familiar with, it’s all so amazing, that’s great.” At some point the people that have an appreciation for that are all going to die, and we’re going to be stuck out here trying to figure out how to engage all these 45-year-old people that we ignored when they were 20 and 30 and 35, and turned off by all that stuff. It’s kind of this outlaw opera, revolutionary thing. We can reach out there and appeal to young hipsters, and that sort or 25-to-35 age group. A lot of those people are just bored. They’ve seen everything. They always want to be the first ones to see it, but it’s hard to impress those guys. We have a rally unique tool in our belt, these voices we carry around, that are able to express in a completely different emotional context some of these ideas that theater has been dealing with for a long time, it gives a fresh perspective.

People are shocked when opera singers can act and tell a story. I’ve gotten into furious online debates about the purpose of opera. People say, “The purpose of opera is good singing. The purpose of opera is making good music.” And I say, “Why the hell don’t we just have concerts if the purpose is just amazing music and incredible voices?” It’s not an opera if there’s not a story to tell. That’s the purpose of opera: to tell a story. If it was just good music, we wouldn’t need costumes, we wouldn’t need all this stuff.

We talked a bit about the increasing prominence of “Barihunks” — Mike is officially certified as such by no lesser authority than the Barihunks blog.

MM: You hear a lot of complaints about the way that this movement about “having sexy people do opera, aw, it’s ruining it!” [The complaints are coming from] a lot of people in the older generation that have served opera really well, and they’re irritated. It shouldn’t be at the expense of singing.

I don’t think it’s a zero-sum game. You don’t have to be either a good singer or in shape. You can do both. Actors are expected to do it all the time. They play to type; they are expected to look a certain way. I played Joseph Desrochers a few weeks ago: I was pumped up, looking as mean and lean as I could for this character.

Mean and Lean: As Joseph Desrochers.
Tulsa Opera, 2013.
Photo courtesy of Barihunks Blog.

And then I had to shift gears to play Jim Thompson. I realized that the bulk of my story is reflection. He’s an older man, his body mask isn’t a 29-year-old convict, it was a 59-year-old, broken-down, former P.OW. I eased up on my diet, got a little bit lower center of gravity. It feels different, better. My center of gravity is lower. It’s easier to make this body mask to play this guy. You take pictures of me in Dead Man Walking and me in this, you wouldn’t think it was the same person.

But that’s what our job is. In theater, they would just find some guy who was old looking. There’s plenty of guys who look old, but there’s not many that can sing like this and look old, too.

Q: And you do look old, especially once you put on that cardigan!

MM: It’s so hard to put on, which makes it even better. One of the coolest things for me is the transition — he has so many transitions, playing so many characters, interrogators and officials [as well as Thompson]. Once you press start, this piece moves. Making these transitions smooth is difficult.

One of my favorites is right after the slide show, with all these nice happy family memories, and all of a sudden the Vietnam pictures and the prison camps and the guys in their striped pajamas. It’s too much for him to handle. Suddenly you see him go from middle-aged Thompson to the guy who died angry and unfulfilled and bewildered by what happened to his life. I get that sweater and pull it on, over that stroked-out arm. Wheezing because he’s a lifetime smoker. His back was broken so the injury was really showing — for me as an actor, it’s great.

I observed that it takes guts to do all that while singing simultaneously.

MM: The word “no” doesn’t often cross my lips. I don’t know how to use it. I probably should be better at it, but I’m not afraid of anything any more.

Q: Were you ever?

MM: The first time I went to the Met to cover, I went to that building, and I wasn’t me. I didn’t know how to really act in that place. When I was younger, I was afraid to be who I was. Afraid to be this kind of good ol’ boy from East Texas that does opera. I realized that I could fake being fancy-pants generic American intellectual. I could do that pretty well, but it wasn’t true. I went through some pretty radical life changes in the past five years or so, I’ve been divorced and broke off an engagement. I didn’t lose everything, but you kind of feel like you do. You feel like everything’s gone and what have you been doing this for. After a while you feel like fuck it, I’m just gonna do it. I’m gonna do stories my way and tell them the way I want. If this business doesn’t like it, they can stop hiring me. Thus far they haven’t done it. There’ve been some lean years, but I’m stickin’ with it until they decide that’s enough.

George Jones, with his sometime wife, Tammy Wynette.
The country singer’s death was announced
the morning that Mike and I got together;
we began our conversation with a coffee-mug toast to him.

Q: What kind of music did you listen to when you were growing up?

MM: Country, bluegrass, and gospel. Almost exclusively. A little bit of funk and blues thrown in there because my dad had an incredible vinyl collection. I didn’t know who Bob Dylan was until I got to college. The Beatles, I had no idea.

My grandfather was a preacher; I grew up Missionary Baptist. They started me off young. I was third grade, second grade, playing guitar, playing in church during the music service. Brother Green, my mentor as a young kid, would bring me up there. He had a Gibson Hollow Body, and I’d get up there and mangle hymns, and nobody ever told me I was terrible. They instilled me with confidence.

The Bible doesn’t say make a beautiful noise, it says make a joyful noise unto the Lord. That’s what I do.

I’d sing that music. My buddy Randy Lindley showed me a few things on the guitar. He’s now the lead guitar player for Amber Digby and Midnight Flyer, a country-and-western band. She’s a big deal, sings at the Opry and some duets with Vince Gill. Every now and then they come to Fort Worth and let me sit in. It’s like that career I never had. Every opera singer has that alternative career they wish they’d had, me it’s a roadhouse country singer, retro, nothing after 1980. Once or twice a year I get the chance to relive that fantasy.

I think that’s the one thing we miss as opera singers, and what’s great about Glory Denied, so often the audience is 30 feet away from us at the closest. It’s 2000 seats and so distant, but with Glory Denied, they’re right there, really close. You miss that as opera singers. Most singers didn’t sing opera as little kids, they did something else that had that immediacy. I think among a lot of singers there’s a longing for that. Glory Denied has that immediate response. At Pearl’s, the lights are up and you can see the audience in the eyes; they’re right there with you.

Thompson and the recollection of his younger self (David Blalock).
Glory Denied, Fort Worth Opera Festival 2013.
Photo courtesy of Ellen Appel.

Q: How did you find opera, or did opera find you?

MM: I was playing football in high school, and I ended up breaking some fingers in one of my hands. After practice, I walked into the counselor’s office. My hand was wrapped up, and I said, “What do I do about typing class?” It was my freshman year. She said, “There’s only two things you can do mid-semester: choir or drama. Pick one.”

Those drama kids were super weird — I didn’t want to be one of those — which is funny because that’s totally what I am now. I ended up joining the choir because I knew I could sing already, I figured that would be an easy A. I’d sung in choirs, but when football started I gave it up. Mike Ware was the choir director; he said, “You’ve got something there.” He encouraged me to stay, and the next year Angela Rivera came in as choir director, she was also my choir director in fifth grade.

She encouraged me to join competitions. I ended up making it into the all-state choir of Texas. That year, it’s funny, that year of all-state, Ava Pine was in that choir, and so was Jesus Garcia. We were all in there together, 1994. I actually pulled out [the program] — all those names are on there.

When you make all-state in Texas, a lot of schools give you scholarship money, and I wasn’t going to get a scholarship any other way. I figured I’d just take the money and get a business major. But they sucked me right in. The all-state piqued my interest in Classical music. I’d never done that before, pieces like the Mozart Requiem. I’d never heard music like this, much less sung it.

I got my first role in college, actually a summer program at Stephen F. Austin, I did Frank Maurrant in [Kurt Weill’s] Street Scene. It’s a little low for me, but I’d love to do that again. That’s what got me, I think: this really compelling story. I got to play this total bastard; in the way he thought and the way he viewed the world, he reminded me so much of all the men in my family. My grandpa could stop a room with a look, silence every movement with one look, he was terrifying. I’d just use that face he would make and that manner he always had, and terrorize people. That made me see how I could affect people in that way. It seduced me, and I couldn’t get enough of it.

I did all the little roles you do in college, little-known Rossini operas, the stuff you do to cut your teeth. It felt like a contest or athletic event: who can sing the best G or who has the most coloratura? It didn’t feel meaningful to me. Then I got to CCCM and did John Procter in [Robert Ward’s] The Crucible. That just — bang, I can tell this story, I know this guy. Then I got to work on Margaret Garner, same thing.

I could start to see that was going to be my niche. But I didn’t have the connections; I didn’t know how to break into that world. I’d hear all these guys my age doing these new works, and I’d say, “How the hell, who are they talking to, to get these parts?”

I came to Fort Worth right when they started doing this [contemporary] stuff. It was a marriage made in heaven. I was able to express these thoughts with freedom and confidence. It was like coming home, so much so that I moved here for two or three years.

This company really took me in. I was going though a difficult time in my life. Brett Starr and I, Roger Honeywell and I, Jeff Jones and Joseph Lesley, Darren and Steven [Bryant, Darren’s husband], Thomas [Rhodes], Nathan DePoint, these guys lifted me up, took care of me, and became some of my closest friends in the world. I thought, “I could go to New York, but all of my best friends are here in Fort Worth. Why would I leave?”

That’s one of the things we miss. You get lonely out there on that road. You make fast friends, we all do that, quick relationships and all that. But long-term serious, meaningful relationships that you come back to over and over again? Man, that’s the best.

As Don Giovanni.
Des Moines Metro Opera 2012.
Photo courtesy of Barihunks Blog.

Q: To what extent does being Texan define you?

MM: When you choose to brand yourself like I’ve done — I didn’t create this thing, I just decided to tell my truth and to be myself — but it’s a big risk, because people have certain preconceived notions about an accent. They think you’re stupid or you’re not taken seriously. I’ve probably lost jobs or missed opportunities because of that, but I think it’s more important to be this guy and tell this story.

I know that any day of the week, they can find guys to tell the Figaro story or the Almaviva story. But there are stories that are just mine, and those are the stories I want to tell. I’ve got to be myself to tell the truth. I think that it’s a longer road this way. Often it takes people two or three times meeting you to know who you are. It’s a process. If you’re playing a generic guy, in a suit, with a clean haircut — I could be a businessman or an accountant.

You meet those board members on their turf. I know that we’re always gonna have the professional crowd. We’re always gonna have them. I don’t think we’re at a real risk of losing buttoned-up professionals. I don’t think that’s gonna happen. But we are missing an opportunity tor each out to people who don’t look like that. When I go to a town where they’re liberal with their comps, I go to a neighborhood like this, and I find the most tattooed-up, earringed people, and I give them these tickets. I say, “These tickets are expensive and hard to get. I won’t ask anything of you, I just want you to come.” And they will show up.

For me it’s the most wonderful thing in the world to see a guy with purple hair and a Mohawk standing next to some multimillionaire enjoying the same thing. That’s the point of art, to create commonality among us all. That’s the reason why the cavemen started gesturing with their hands and making cave paintings so they could remove the barriers and have common knowledge. That’s what art is. It’s our Rosetta Stone.

So often we get these groups, they don’t speak each other’s language. But you put that bartender next to a CEO in [the audience for] Glory Denied, and they’re going to have a similar experience that they can talk about in a way that they can’t talk about other things.

I know I come across like an evangelist. I gave a couple of readings from The Book of Darren. If he ever writes an autobiography, that should be the name of it. Him and guys like him are what’s saving this business. It is kind of funny that during the greatest contraction we ever had in this business — it’s been rough, fees are in the toilet, people are financing their futures just to hang on for long enough — but there’s never been more new work and more exciting things happening than ever before. It’s because of guys like Darren.

The soldier and his bride: Thompson and Alyce (Caroline Worra),
with the figures of their younger selves
(David Blalock, Sydney Mancasola).
Glory Denied, Fort Worth Opera Festival 2013.
Photo courtesy of Ellen Appel.

You understand that there’s something that got a hold of you. You came from the same places these people came from, it can get a hold of them, too. Growing up in a double-wide trailer in Cut and Shoot, Texas. Thirty family members and friends are coming to this show, most of them have never been to an opera. They have no idea what they’re going to see. They’re thinking about stereotypes. They have no clue what they’re going to see on Saturday afternoon.

A friend came in to watch it, just to get his reaction. He had no idea. He didn’t even know what opera was. He came up to me afterward and said, “I started crying at the catalogue aria [“Welcome home”] and I didn’t stop crying until after the end of the show. I can’t even talk right now.” He’s younger than me and he doesn’t know anything about opera. It almost ceases to be opera. It’s an experience.

We have our own club here. You walk into any restaurant with Darren, and they’ve got that cocktail ready for him. You can hear it shaking. He’s the prince of this town. He’s made opera cool. Everybody’s talking about it. I bump into people, you have a conversation in a bar, “Oh, you’re one of those opera people!” We’re like the cool kids in this town.

It’s Fort Worth, for fuck’s sake. This town is moving in a direction, they call it Funky Town, it’s like Austin in 1954, you can feel it coming. How crazy is it that the company that’s doing all the new exciting work is Fort Worth? It’s crazy. It’s not Austin, it’s not Dallas, it’s not Houston. Fort Worth, it’s exciting. I love all of those towns, but man, you can’t get more of a Texas town than Fort Worth, and that’s where everything’s happening.

Glory Denied continues at Fort Worth Opera, with performances tonight (if you hurry!) and May 11 at the McDavid Studio at Bass Hall. Also starring Caroline Worra, Sydney Mancasola, and David Blalock in a production staged by Dean Anthony and conducted by Tyson Deaton. For more information and tickets, click here.

Cool Kids of Funky Town: Fort Worth Opera barihunks
at a lunch in their honor, hosted by a certain blog.
Left to right: Aaron Sorensen, Michael Adams, Steven Eddy, Wes Mason, Michael Mayes, John Boehr, and Anthony Reed.

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