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ARTS AND LEISURE DESK |
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THEATER; Where Musicals and Opera Overlap, a Hybrid Emerges |
Published: July 14, 2002
THE line dividing opera and musical theater has never been clear. But in recent
times both forms have been expanding, and crossovers are increasingly common.
In fact, some people deny that any distinction exists.
To explore that point, the Center for
Contemporary Opera in New York presented a rather daring experiment earlier
this year: the first act of an opera performed twice -- by a musical theater
cast before the intermission, and then by an opera cast.
If lobby chat and questionnaires filled out
by the audience reveal anything, most people preferred the beauty of the
opera-trained voices and the passion and movement of the theater cast. They
wanted it all, and why not? For the composer and librettist, the chance to hear
the two versions -- performed in concert style -- was so fruitful that they
have now created a hybrid, which they envision performed, and even cast, in a
new way.
The experiment involved the first act of
''Chéri,'' an opera based on Colette's novel of the same name, with music by
Michael Dellaira and libretto by Susan Yankowitz, a playwright, and mostly
written in 2000. The Center for Contemporary Opera, which was founded by the
conductor Richard Marshall to encourage the creation of new work and support that
which already exists, took over the Clark Studio Theater at Lincoln Center for
two consecutive evenings last winter.
The first night, all 147 seats were filled by
the center's subscribers, friends and some opera and theater people. By the
second night, word of the experiment had attracted the opera composers Mark
Adamo and John Corigliano and representatives from American Opera Projects
Inc., which presents new works and works in progress; the Mary Flagler Cary
Charitable Trust, a foundation with interests in opera; and the New York
Festival of Song, which encourages songwriting through performance and
commissions.
When people talk about opera, they usually
mean a specific musical form that flowered in the 19th century: through-sung
with no spoken dialogue, expressing large emotions in large voices suited to
large (unmiked) opera houses. By musical theater, they usually mean the
Broadway musical: a play of spoken dialogue, with musical numbers arising from
the dramatic action.
But these distinctions have never been rigid.
Mozart's opera ''The Magic Flute'' uses spoken dialogue; ''Porgy and Bess,''
which George Gershwin originally wrote as through-sung and considered a ''folk
opera,'' has been performed in theaters as often as in opera houses. Marc A.
Scorca, the president of Opera America, a service organization for opera
companies, exclaimed in an interview, ''How wonderful Sondheim and 'Carousel'
sound in opera voices!''
These days, there is a growing repertory of
intellectually and musically challenging pieces that are difficult to
categorize; for them, Eric Salzman, the associate artistic director of the
Center for Contemporary Opera, deploys the familiar all-purpose term ''music
theater.'' Other descriptions include ''singing theater'' and ''opera
theater.'' Perhaps the most useful formulation is Mr. Scorca's: opera
''emphasizes music,'' he says, and theater ''emphasizes words.''
From the start of the ''Chéri'' project,
music and text urged each other along. Mr. Dellaira and Ms. Yankowitz, who are
both in their 50's, were equally persuaded that the Colette novel would work as
the basis for a libretto. Set in the darkly elegant demimonde of pre-World War
I Paris, the story explores the doomed passion between an aging courtesan named
Léa and a beautiful but decadent young man she calls Chéri.
Mr. Dellaira's adventurous appetite for
language has led him to set and record texts by the poet Emily Dickinson, the
novelist John Dos Passos and the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. A member of
the board of the Center for Contemporary Opera, he has a doctorate in music
from Princeton (where he studied with Milton Babbitt) and has written cerebral
12-tone music as well as the words and music for a rock-pop song cycle called
''Annette.'' The recording, on which he plays keyboards, became a Billboard
magazine Top Album Pick.
Mr. Dellaira said he had learned a lot from
rock and pop about how to write opera. ''It's stylized sung speech,'' he said.
''The recitatives in 'Chéri' are like rock verses. When I think both energy and
information, and tuneful, I think rock.''
Ms. Yankowitz, too, has found adventurous
ways to fuse language and sound. In the 1970 ''Terminal,'' which she wrote for
the director Joseph Chaikin and the Open Theater, the actors' hands and feet
elicited music from the surfaces they touched, words dissolved into sound, and
sounds communicated emotions and experiences outside the usual range of
theatrical expression. She wrote a novel, ''Silent Witness,'' and then a
screenplay from it, set inside the mind of a deaf-mute, and a 1991 play,
''Night Sky,'' about an aphasic who speaks in a poetic language stripped of
syntax. Also directed by Mr. Chaikin, it was partly inspired by his own battle
with aphasia.
Among her recent projects have been a gospel
and blues opera with the jazz musician Taj Mahal and, with the film composer
Elmer Bernstein, a romantic fantasy in which characters slide from speech into
song. ''The Revenge,'' a play she was inspired to write after seeing Verdi's
opera ''Rigoletto,'' will have a reading on Tuesday, directed by Mr. Chaikin
and starring F. Murray Abraham. (Ms. Yankowitz used my English translation of
Victor Hugo's French play ''The King Amuses Himself,'' which was the basis of
the libretto for ''Rigoletto.'')
''Music elevates the text,'' Ms. Yankowitz
said. ''It allows for the extremely dramatic gesture that most theater these
days does not accommodate.'' A libretto must ''rest on a bed of music,'' she
added, and be singable: ''I sit there at my desk opening my mouth. Open vowels!
Faaaall, not winnnter; faaaall!''
While the composer and the librettist worked
together, the two casts (15 people in all, with one performer playing the same
role in both versions) rehearsed separately. Since they started with different
priorities, they discovered on the nights of the performances that the two
versions had diverged dramatically.
For example, the opera version of Léa, Marion
Capriotti, began with the music and ''let the words be an embellishment,'' she
said. Planted behind her music stand, shoulders squared, Ms. Capriotti focused
on the score and worked throughout the rehearsal period ''to give the audience
a line of music they can sink their ears into.'' Thus, in Léa's big aria
mourning the loss of Chéri (sung by Nicholas Phan), because of ''the length and
sweep -- long lines and long releases -- what I had to do was get behind them
and let the outpouring of sound carry the emotional content of the aria.''
Since an opera singer's job, especially with
a new opera, is to allow the audience to hear the music in the composer's head,
preparation means intensive practice. In the theater, on the other hand,
rehearsal of a new play is often a process of discovery, a time when the actor
interprets the material creatively in collaboration with the writer, the
director and the other actors. Ann Crumb, the music theater Léa, tried
different readings right up to the last performance: different rhythms, lengths
of notes, vocal registers.
Ms. Crumb found it frustrating to be tied to
the music stand. When Léa was scolding young Chéri (Erik Lautier), she slammed
the music stand down to punctuate her lines. She sang tilting her curly head
toward Chéri, boxing at him playfully, leaning against him seductively. Ms.
Crumb has sung art songs as well as jazz, and Mr. Dellaira praised her
''musical, expressive'' voice. Yet she refers to herself primarily as an
actress. Her phrasing, she said, is ''propelled by what the character is
feeling,'' and she will ''sacrifice a sound that I could make fuller or purer''
if necessary to articulate a word. ''Emotion colors sound,'' she said. ''I love
the multiple colors of the voice.''
By the start of the dress rehearsal, the two
casts were singing differently enough to affect the piano accompaniment. ''I
work to singers' strengths,'' said Mark Shapiro, the production's music
director who served as the pianist. ''I wanted the opera singers to sing out --
they have more power vocally -- and I tried to approximate for them on the
piano more orchestral color. Whereas theater singers, because of the nature of
speech, which is their primary focus, sing shorter sounds. I accompanied them
with lighter sound, less pedal, shorter notes -- a drier sound.''
After the casts disbanded, the composer and
librettist listened to the tapes of both versions over and over, discussing
what they heard. The ''Chéri'' that has emerged is an unconventionally eclectic
mix of techniques from various musical and dramatic genres: one rather comic
character will be operatic in his exaggerated booming, while another will veer
toward musical comedy. Some major lines that had been delivered in sprechstimme
will now be sung, and vice versa.
Response to the experiment showed that
''Chéri'' has potential as opera or as musical theater, confirming Mr.
Dellaira's long-standing dream of a ''Chéri'' with opera voices in a Broadway
theater and with musical theater voices at Lincoln Center -- simultaneously.
(Is that so far-fetched, when the director Baz Luhrmann's version of ''La
Bohème'' is expected to open on Broadway this December?) In fact, several
companies have expressed interest in producing ''Chéri'' -- both acts this
time. And the collaborators hope to workshop the piece in its new hybrid form.
Looking back on the experience, they don't
seem to realize that they think of themselves in terms that transcend the old
distinctions between words and music. ''I'm corny,'' Mr. Dellaira confessed.
''I'm not embarrassed by big gestures and strong emotions, which are not in
fashion these days. I'm trying to get the audience to tears -- no, to get
myself to tears -- and do to them what Puccini does to me.''
Ms. Yankowitz, in her way, agreed. ''I'll
write more librettos,'' she said. ''I like the way the words sound. For a
person who can't carry a tune, like me, it's my way of singing.''
Photos: Erik Lautier, left, in the title role
of the musical theater version of ''Chéri,'' with Caesar Samayoa, Larry Picard
and Ann Crumb.; Marion Capriotti as Léa in the opera version of ''Chéri.''
(Photographs by Richard Termine for The New York Times)(pg. 19); Nicholas Phan,
left, as the title character and Deborah Anne Faw as his mother in the opera
version of ''Chéri.'' In the musical theater version, Ann Crumb was Chéri's lover
and Erik Lautier was Chéri. The performances were an experiment at the Clark
Studio Theater by the Center for Contemporary Opera. (Photographs by Richard
Termine for The New York Times)(pg. 5)