Jonathan Minton, Actor, writes here about his first experience with Opera as a student in the UAA Opera Ensemble this semester!
Character and the Great Challenge
Opera is all about the characters.
The first opera I ever saw was sophomore year of high school when a production of Turandot came to the Alaska Center for the Performing Arts. I had a loose idea of the plot and characters going into it, and not a clue of what the music was going to be like (though I had the feeling that, at some point, a big-bosomed soprano with an even bigger voice would be standing front and center, delivering one heck of an aria, eliciting tears from the house; I at least got that part right). Leaving the theater, I realized that I understood even less about the plot at the end than I did at the beginning. I chalked a lot of this up to the fact that, at times, admittedly, I was bored out of my mind. And I was never sure where my attention should be (There’s a princess, right? Wait, who’s that guy and what’s he saying? Why is he angry? Who are those three guys and why is everyone laughing? The subtitles aren’t helping!) But, I also credited this lack of understanding to another common issue- sometimes, operas just don’t make sense.
I still believe this to be true. But as I got older, and became more and more learned in theater, I realized that quite often, this was the case in general. Look at one of the plots of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (also an opera)- Oberon is pissed and wants to mess with Titania so, naturally, he commands his fairy friend to find a magic flower from which he’ll drop its potion into Titania’s sleeping eye so she’ll fall in love with an actor with a donkey’s head who, naturally, has fallen asleep at her feet, by coincidence. Yeah, okay, makes sense. While it may not be logical, given the circumstances of the story, I could at least follow it because there was a text and script to keep track of characters and events. And as someone who uses the script, the dialogue to distinguish these characters and events, who hasn’t had much work with music at all, following the characters and story with nothing but music (which, to the untrained ear, can sometimes all sound the same) could only confuse me more than I already was. But that became the challenge for me while working on this Opera Ensemble production- the challenge to bridge the form of theater I was already incredibly familiar with and the form of theater I had no previous experience with, and combine. And I have to say that challenge has proven to be a highly enjoyable one.
The first step to making sense of the story was to actually make the story itself. At the beginning of this process, there were only a few things I had to go off of: much of the music is French cabaret and opera, and the ensemble consists entirely of five women and one man. Okay. Now how do we make this work, Tim Gunn?
As an actor, director and writer, I’ve always held that the most important part of any story (novel, play, television, cinema, song) is the character. And that’s where we started, working to discover the characters based on the selected music, determining the relationships to each other, and most importantly, decide why we’re singing what we’re singing when we’re singing it. One of the key elements of great musical theater is that a character will break into song when there is no other way they can express themselves. True, opera may be more technical than musical theater, in many ways, but there are many of those principals that transcend type and form to be universal. And this is the element that can lead one to liken Rose in Gypsy to Romeo in Romeo & Juliet- when Rose sings to Louise that she had a dream, how is it any different than when Romeo resorts to poetry and verse to describe Juliet by saying ‘O, she doth teach the torches to burn bright!/It seems she hangs upon the cheek of night’(1.5, 45-46)? Both characters have to use more than just normal, every day speech (for their given times) to fully and accurately express themselves at that moment. Why does any soprano sing their aria rather than just say it (style and consistency aside)? Our production was aided by the fact that our entire written material was music; it’s all expression.
Helping guide and determine the story and characters was the aforementioned issue of having five women to one man. With a balance like that, the idea of staging an epic, operatic interpretation of Saving Private Ryan wouldn’t have been particularly realistic. At the risk of making myself out to be more pretentious than I already sound, at the beginning of the semester I had been watching a lot of Fellini and Godard, both directors that focused often on women, and what they mean and represent to men as objects, lovers, mothers, partners, etc. And when Mari Hahn, our director, had said that she was going for a French cabaret look, immediately my mind went to the image of Joel Grey surrounded by the Kit-Kat Girls. The challenge that came from that, for me, at least, was to create a story that was equally an homage to, and separate from, Kander & Ebb’s Cabaret, Godard’s Vivre Sa Vie, and Fellini’s 8 ½ (and subsequently, Maury Yeston’s Nine).
And I would say, with a great deal of confidence, that challenge has been greatly overcome. As an ensemble, we’ve crafted a story about unrequited love, identity crisis, loneliness, a little bit of alcoholism (all elements that make a good opera) and more, set against the back drop of prostitution in a French brothel over the course of one night. Is it racy? Sure! But how much opera isn’t driven by sex, violence, double-entendre and tons of champagne? The back drop is merely that, a back drop. The most important element of this production are the characters.
By agreeing to work on this, I was agreeing to step out of my comfort zone. I’m not much of a singer (excluding karaoke and the shower), and I’ve only directed one musical; never opera. But while that may not be my strength, it is the strength of Mari Hahn, Eden Barrington, Chelsea Asmus, Amanda Farnsworth, Jillian Pollock, Sujin Scott, and pianist Janet Stiles. It has been, and continues to be a great deal of work. But I think that the audience is going to find that the work speaks for itself.
Or rather, like the characters, sing for itself.
