Allen, the general manager of Anchorage Opera, is sitting near the bottom of a staircase that’s part of the set for the company’s production of Georges Bizet’s Carmen. The show marks the beginning of his second season running the company. It’s Friday afternoon and there’s less than 24 hours before the first paying audience for Carmen is set to arrive. Allen is surrounded by a small traffic jam of workers on the stage of the Discovery Theater at the Alaska Center for the Performing Arts.
Carmen is one of the most often-staged plays in musical theater, but it was a considered a genre-defying and somewhat vulgar mess by Parisian critics when it debuted in 1875. For one thing, it lacked a formal ballet. For another, the lead characters—a Gypsy woman who labors in a factory and a soldier (a corporal, not an officer)—were too common for the elite audience. Bizet’s work even includes female factory workers smoking on stage, not to mention brawling with each other. The show became a hit soon afterward, but in Venice not Paris. Presumably its new audience accepted theater about working class characters, the type you might meet in a bar or at a hockey game.
|
|
“I really disagree with the elitist approach to programming. Opera in its day had the same audience as the people who go to big time wrestling,” Allen says.
So Anchorage audiences are going to see a faster version of Carmen than some purists might be used to.
“You have to understand. They may have done it this way in the 1930s. They may have done this in 1870, but today we compete for a different audience. If Mozart were alive today, he would be in tune with that audience.” The implication is that George Bizet would be “in tune” with the audience, too, and wouldn’t mind if the Anchorage Opera production of Carmen took less than three hours to perform or that an extra intermission had been inserted.
Allen says artists, (and producers such as himself) have a responsibility to make art that reaches a broad audience. “But first, we have a responsibility to be good,” he says, adding that’s the way to keep a new audience returning.
So Allen has been reaching out to unlikely places for new fans. He’s taken Kathryn Allyn, the New York-based mezzo-soprano cast as the lead in Carmen, to typical promotions with public radio and the classical music radio station KLEF FM 98; but they also chatted with DJs on-the airwaves of KBRJ, FM 104.1, Anchorage’s commercial country station that goes by the nickname “K-Bear.”
The opera’s internet presence includes a cheeky blog, where a recent post is titled “I was Country and Opera when Country and Opera wasn’t cool.” It recommends a mix list in which Patsy Cline’s “I Fall to Pieces” and Hank Williams’ “Your Cheatin’ Heart” bookend Giuseppe Verdi’s “La donna e mobile.”
“We have people who drive to the opera while listening to country music on the radio,” Allen says. “It’s music and stories. You can like it or not like it, but you shouldn’t dismiss it because it doesn’t fit one particular genre.”
Allen is 45, and took a somewhat circuitous route to opera. He discovered he could sing bass-baritone while in a choir at UCLA, where he was studying for a political science degree. He aspired to attend law school, but his singing took him to a degree in vocal performance at Boston Conservatory. He grew up in Northern California, and cut his artistic teeth playing drums in a punk rock band.
“I still keep a drum kit in my office, for tension,” he says, and even as rock drummer he noticed his priorities—rehearsals and that insistence on making “good” art—weren’t the same as some of his rock and roll peers.
In a small music rehearsal room in West High School, a teenager raises her hand and asks mezzo-soprano Kathryn Allyn what’s her favorite part of performing in opera.
“I like the killing,” Allyn says. Her quip draws laughs from the students. About a dozen are in the room. They used their lunch period to meet Allyn, who talked about growing up country and becoming opera, a career that has taken her to Carnegie Hall and to venues in such far-flung places as Tokyo.
Gritty plots and Allyn’s dark humor aside, the singer also admits she likes the combination of acting and singing she has to muster in opera. The scene after Carmen is arrested is both exciting and satisfying. “I have to look like I am trying to get away, but I can’t get away, and I have things to sing,” Allyn says.
Allyn first took to musical theater while in high school, but it wasn’t opera. She worked two summers as a teenager on stage in the Palo Duro Canyon, in Canyon City, Texas. “The back of the canyon was the stage wall. We did this show that was kind of a rip-off of Oklahoma. It was called Texas,” Allyn tells the students.
Because the stage was backed against a canyon wall, its wings didn’t connect. Performers sometimes had to travel underneath the stage through a tunnel. This being a canyon, the tunnel provided a shady place for snakes, scorpions and other wildlife. “We had to stop the show for ferrets and rattle snakes. I missed my graduation, but… I was a star,” Allyn says.
The West High students have formed an opera club. Music teacher Christopher More—who sings the role of Morales in Carmen—is one of the club’s sponsors and says he was a bit surprised when students wanted to form it. “Isn’t that the coolest thing you’ve heard, for a high school in 2008?” he asks.
More didn’t think opera was cool when he was their age. He played violin, and when he got to high school his father insisted he join the choir. “He said, ‘You are joining the choir’ and I was like, ‘Pshaw’—as if playing the violin was more masculine. But the first day, I knew this was what I wanted to do. I just liked everything that was going on around me,” More says.
About twenty years after Allyn dodged the snakes and ferrets she was in New York, and successfully auditioning for small parts at New York City Opera. “When I started in opera, I did everything but the laundry,” she tells the students. She doles out practical advice. Protect your voice. Supplement your income—“Tending bar is hard on your body. Learn office skills. I am a legal secretary”—and learn accents, languages and memorization skills.
Especially memorization.
“Companies have less and less money for rehearsals, so everybody wants someone who has done the part before. It’s the hardest thing to do your first anything. And when you get a part, and they say you need to be off-book the first day, they’re not kidding. It’s get fired on day two if you’re not,” Allyn says.
For his part Allen tells the students they can be aspire to opera singing anywhere, but shouldn’t be hung-up on conventions and genres. They should aspire to keep singing. “Don’t believe it when people tell you that you can only sing opera, or only sing musical theater, or only sing Country,” he says.
He also throws props to their teacher. “We have the talent right here in Anchorage. He could do this anywhere,” Allen says, pointing to More.
On stage at the Discovery Theater, about a dozen people walk about with tools and hardware, putting the finishing touches on the set. A woman paints Styrofoam globes that are stacked on a wooden street-vendor’s cart to resemble fruit. A carpenter works atop a mock-balcony.
This troupe of working people are marshaled by Lauren Miller, Anchorage Opera’s production manager and technical director, who wears a work shirt with sleeves rolled and a blue bandana to tame her grey hair. She is skilled lighting technician, but also a carpenter and electrician. She could have come to Alaska to build houses, or cabinets, or pipelines. But she builds theater sets, the most temporary form of construction there is. “When it’s over we re-use what you can, and throw the rest away,” Miller says. “All I have is photographs and memories. I think someone wrote a song about that.”
Miller says lighting for dance productions is the art she enjoys most. “But I’d say next is opera. It’s because it’s not realistic—No. I don’t know that it’s not realistic, but opera can be bigger than life,” she says.
The opera’s set pieces were built in a warehouse, trucked over and then reassembled on stage inside the center’s Discovery Theater. People are still hauling more from the trucks, even though a full-costume rehearsal was completed the night before.
“The people you see around here,” Torrie Allen says, indicating the workers, “They depend on the opera.” His point—and he reinforces it by adding restaurants, gift shops even parking garages to the mix—is that Anchorage Opera has a responsibility to draw people downtown and create art that keeps them coming back.
“We have a responsibility to be good. I feel we have to put on great work, because of that contribution to the economy,” he says.
Comments