Opera on the Mall

La Bohème this weekend

Who wants to go to the opera with me? It's free!

Washington National Opera is doing their annual outdoor live simulcast on the National Mall (plus adding theaters at universities all over the country) this Sunday afternoon. This year's offering is Giacomo Puccini's La Bohème, one of the beloved "war horses" of the opera repertoire and the inspiration for the popular musical and movie Rent.

The outdoor opera broadcasts (on a huge, billboard-sized Jumbotron screen) started two years ago with the highly successful Porgy and Bess, followed last year by an unfortunately rainy Madama Butterfly. This year, though, the weather forecast for Sunday afternoon is a beautiful, sunny day with temperatures in the low 80s.

So, Ryan and I are going, and we'd like to get a few people together and organize a little picnic lunch we all can eat on the ground at the Mall during the show. It'll be lots of fun! Will there be gourmet home-cooked foods? Or will be be dining on fried chicken from the Safeway deli? Who's interested? Let me know so we can get this all planned out.

"Curtain" time for the opera is 2 p.m., so we should plan to be at the Mall by at least 1 p.m. While the opera is sung in Italian, there will be English translations on the screen as subtitles.

This should be a particularly interesting production. The opera originally is set in the 19th century with the bohemian artists of Paris, but Washington National Opera has elected to "update" the production to the modern day. I understand there's a La Cage a Folle-type production number (no doubt at the Cafe Momus) and there are video montages of Mimi and Musetta. It will either be wonderful or a total abomination! Let's go see!

For those of you not in the D.C. metro area, there are a number of colleges showing the simulcast as well. More details are on WNO's Web site, but I think the schools are: Brown, Bryn Mawr, Cumberland School of Law, Duke, New York University, North Carolina School of the Arts, Ohio University, Princeton, Rice, Southern Virginia Higher Education Center, Temple, Tulane, Union College, U. S. Military Academy, Virginia Tech, Wellesley, and the Universities of Alabama, Arkansas, Colorado, Florida, Massachusetts–Amherst, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Richmond, Virginia and Washington.

Here's a pic of me the last time I sang in a Bohème production (no, I'm not singing in this one, and, unfortunately, I don't know any of the cast of this show). My makeup designer asked me to grow a moustache for the production, so I did that for nearly three months, and he still had to color it in with an eyebrow pencil!

New theater

Last Saturday we went to the open house for the new Harmon Center for the Arts downtown across from the Verizon Center. The Harmon Center is the new second venue for the Shakespeare Theater Company. The company will continue to operate its original theater a block or two away, so they'll have two places for shows. The old theater holds about 450 and the new theater seats about 750.

The new facility is an office building that's been gutted and completely redone to include the new theater, performance space, concessions, patrons' lounge, box office, office space, and gift shop. The upper floors of the building are traditional office space for outside entities. The architectural design opened the building facade to the street and added a series of cantilevered floors that create more space overhanging the sidewalk, then enclosed it with a glass wall so the entire three floors of the theater lobby will be visible to the street.

I took a few photos inside the new theater, but as they were having a constant series of free performances during the day, flash was prohibited, so you'll have to deal with a little bit of blurriness from me trying to hold the camera still in a dark auditorium.



Above is a photo of the stage. It's rather open with no proscenium or curtain—part of the unfortunate modern trend in theater design to eliminate the "distance" between the action and the audience in an attempt to make live theater more "relevant" (whatever that means). In the second photo, you can see the fly space, which really isn't a fly space, as the lights and things are just hanging there out in the open.



Next is a view of the house. The lower level actually has two levels, but I was standing on the side about midway, so you can see the lower seats, which are on a flatter floor. The balcony up above is quite steeply banked; you can see that in the second photo, taken from the back row of the balcony. The view of the stage from the balcony is actually quite good.

Brian was very excited about the new theater facility, since he is considering applying for a year long internship with the company for after he finishes his technical theater degree at Dartmouth next June.

Stuck

I was playing through my Tannhäuser score this afternoon, and now I can't get the Pilgrim's Chorus out of my head!

Il maestro dorme

Twenty-five years ago, a fairly forgetable movie called Yes, Giorgio! played in Oklahoma City, telling the story of a opera star who loses his voice before an important concert, then falls in love with the doctor who treats him. The operaphiles—of which I was not yet one—were all excited because the main character was played by this fat Italian guy who was, apparently, one of their big opera stars.

We were just college students then, and, while we liked classical music and sang in school and church choirs, we weren't particularly well-versed in opera. Sure, there were a lot of opera melodies that were familiar tunes (thanks to Bugs Bunny and others), but we weren't exactly experts in the genre. But, off we went, and it was that night that I was first exposed to Luciano Pavarotti.

Also for the first time, I heard in that movie a little aria from a Puccini opera Turandot called "Nessun dorma"—None Shall Sleep. It was one of the songs from one of Pavarotti's standard roles as Prince Calàf, but it hadn't yet developed the "signature song" status it would get after the 1990 World Cup performance. And I liked it.

Nessun dorma! Nessun dorma! Tu pure, o Principessa, nella tua fredda stanza guardi le stelle che tremano d'amore e di speranza. Ma il mio mistero è chiuso in me, il nome mio nessun saprà! No, no, sulla tua bocca lo dirò, quando la luce splenderà! Ed il mio bacio scioglierà il silenzio che ti fa mia. Dilegua, o notte! Tramontate, stelle! Tramontate, stelle! All'alba vincerò! Vincerò! Vincerò!

None shall sleep! None shall sleep! Even you, o Princess, in your cold room, watch the stars, that tremble with love and with hope. But my secret is hidden within me, my name no one shall know. No, no, on your mouth I will tell it when the light shines. And my kiss will dissolve the silence that makes you mine! Vanish, o night! Set, stars! Set, stars! At dawn, I will win! I will win! I will win!

The performance was pretty phenomenal, and I was particularly intrigued with the ending: Pavarotti didn't sing "veen-chay-ro," but "vee-nah-chay-ro," adding a little shadow vowel syllable to his native Italian language, giving himself essentially a springboard to catapult him to that long, glorious high B that is the penultimate note of the aria. That's the way everyone sings it now.

Now that Pavarotti was on my radar screen, I started listening to his music, and marveling at his amazingly easy, pure tenor voice. There was never any struggle, never any pressure, never any pinched sound, never any heroic effort. He just floated those high notes on the air.

After that 1990 soccer game, it seems like everyone was a Pavarotti fan. In fact, it got to be next to impossible to get tickets to an opera or a concert when he was on the bill. Ticket prices skyrocketed—one Met gala had tickets as high as $1,875 each. Yet, it was worth it. As magnificent as his voice sounds on television or on a CD, there was nothing quite like hearing it live and in person.

The last time I heard Pavarotti in person was probably back in 1994 or 95 singing at the Metropolitan Opera in New York in a Verdi opera called I Lombardi. I almost didn't get to go, because the performance was long sold-out, and I wasn't able to pull any strings at the box office to get one, even at inflated prices. Fortuitously, on my flight to New York, I ran into Samuel Ramey—also en route to the Met for Lombardi, but to sing it—and bewailed my plight that I wouldn't be able to hear Sam sing because all the Pavarotti fans had bought up all the tickets. Sam said he'd take care of it, and he did: he got me a company pass that put me in the first balcony in a fabulous seat. After the long performance, I went backstage to Sam's dressing room to thank him for the ticket and get him to autograph my program. As I left, I saw this huge line going to Pavarotti's dressing room, so, even though we were only supposed to be backstage when we were on the "approved" guest lists, I decided to seize the moment, get in line, and meet il Maestro.

Once I was in the Presence, I was surprised to see how short he really is. When he is on stage, his voice and his personality made him larger than life, but that was merely an illusion. It was also so obvious that he was dying his eyebrows and beard dark, dark black, as though he wanted to avoid having to get another headshot taken, so he just changed himself to match the old photograph. He was quite patient and quite gracious as the endless fans all came to pay their respects and seek his signature. His staff had to encourage people to move along in the line and not monopolize his time. When it came time for me to greet him, he looked me up and down warily, then in his accented English said, "You sing?" I don't know how he would know to ask me that, but after my confession, he said, "Ah. Remember always to be to the music sincere."

Just a few hours ago, Pavarotti lost his battle with cancer. Today, no doubt, all the news agencies will offer retrospectives of his life and career, probably endlessly playing clips from "Nessun dorma" or "Che gelida manina." Certainly, he was the most important opera singer since Enrico Caruso, he was the modern opera superstar, he was the first cross-over musical artist, he was a leader in bringing opera to the American masses, he made "Nessun dorma" almost a household melody, he was the quintessential divo.

Calàf sings "none shall sleep," and ultimately declares that in his struggle with Princess Turandot, he will win—vincerò. Well, the cancer prevailed in this round with Pavarotti, but it didn't win. It didn't win at all, because that voice will live forever in the recordings and videos and the hearts and minds of all who heard and loved Luciano Pavarotti.

Resto nella pace, Luciano.