La Cenerentola, 2008 Photo: J. Reeder

Article: Summer Season 2008

"It's Summertime Opera in Three-Part Harmony"

The Star Ledger (Peggy McGlone)
Sunday, 7/20/08

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It's opera on a grand scale—times three.

Hours before Opera New Jersey opens its summer season at Princeton's McCarter Theatre Center, interns in the costume shop are hemming and pressing for that night's performance of La Traviata, while onstage some 40 singers and dancers are sweating their way through the first tech rehearsal for The Merry Widow.

When they are done, the stagehands have just four hours to remove Widow's ornate set and replace it with the platforms, doors and walls of Verdi's tragedy.

Call it an artistic marathon: 13 performances of three operas in just 17 days, not to mention two opera concerts, the workshop of a new opera and a kids' summer camp.

"It's controlled chaos, or half- controlled" says John Hoomes, who directed La Traviata.

The company's eight-member staff swells to 166 to produce the festival at the center's Berlind Theatre, alternating performances of La Traviata, Rossini's La Cenerentola (Cinderella) and Lehar's The Merry Widow through next Sunday.

"You need to be flexible and adjust to things. But it makes it exciting in some weird way," said Hoomes.

GETTING STARTED

Six weeks earlier on a blistering June morning, the festival's 56 sing ers and 50-something support staff gathered for the first time in a classroom on the Princeton University campus. General Artistic Director Scott Altman opened with a pep talk emphasizing the company's cooperative spirit. He encouraged everyone to sit in on other rehearsals and to stuff the suggestion box with ideas and requests.

"This is a huge, huge project we are undertaking," he said.

That was an understatement. The festival rotates performances of three productions because, like baseball pitchers, opera singers need to rest between performances. To accommodate their re quired downtime without losing out on every other weekend night, companies rotate work A on Friday, then B on Saturday.

With this operatic hat trick, Opera New Jersey is riding a wave of increased interest in the art form. Nationwide, opera audiences are growing even as those for other performing arts are on the decline. And the festival approach—multiple productions in a limited time—is one of the reasons.

"Opera is a multimedia art form in a multimedia world," says Marc Scorca, president and CEO of Opera America, a national service organization, who adds that the festival companies are experiencing the greatest success. "It's the intensity ... of three operas that exist in close relation to each other. It gets people's attention."

The growth of the Princeton group's summer season mirrors the expansion of the organization. The company first presented its summer festival in 2004 in a 200-seat venue with only piano accompani ment. After three seasons, it added a winter production in 2006, and each year it has added a new venue. Last February, its production of Rigoletto was seen in Morristown, New Brunswick and Princeton.

But the festival is its marquee event, and the company devotes 40 percent of its $1.5 million annual budget to it.

Most of the singers live in the dorms at the Princeton Theological Seminary (spending $225 a week for up to eight weeks) with the principal artists and creative staff housed in 17 area homes. The close quarters, the youthfulness of the studio artists and the amount of training sessions give the season a summer camp feel.

"It's hectic, but it's how you learn, how you continue to work on your craft," says 23-year-old Colin Levin, who like the other 35 studio artists, appears in two productions.

The scheduling is complicated. Three daily rehearsals are held for each show. Directors request cer tain personnel, and the scheduler, Gabriel Harkov, must ensure no one is required at two places at once. Around that basic schedule he must fit wig and costume fit tings—and even nap times. Rehearsals for La Cenerentola were held in the studio theater above the Princeton University Day Care Center, where no singing was permitted while the children slept.

The schedule is further complicated by the company's mission to train the next generation of artists. In lieu of salaries, the studio artists receive training from highly re garded teachers, including Thomas Bagwell (Metropolitan Opera), Bruce Norris (New York City Opera) and Jose Melendez (The Curtis Institute).

In the six weeks leading up to the first performance, more than 340 coaching sessions were held. Another 250 sessions in opera scenes and musical theater were given to the studio artists, to prep them for the four cabaret-style performances, two held outdoors in the town square.

"We're essentially trading services for training," says 24-year-old Aaron Sankow, a tenor who sings Gastone in La Traviata and performs in the chorus of The Merry Widow.

Adam Herskowitz, a 29-year-old chorus member who teaches music at the Gray Charter School in Newark, says the stage experience is valuable. "I'm standing onstage with excellent performers and I am able to watch them and see them in rehearsal. You prepare yourself better for when you get there," he says.

The training helps attract young singers to the program, which in turn has fueled the company's rapid growth.

"Scott is able to pull in the right balance of singer ... young and established," says Hoomes. "This company has exploded with all that talent, all that ambition."

ROTATING RESOURCES

Patricia Hibbert's high-speed sewing machine almost drowns out the vocals coming from the rehearsal of La Traviata next door. It's late afternoon on June 27, the end of the third week of rehearsals, and costume designer and shop manager Hibbert and her crew of five stitch, hem and iron to the arias sung by Elizabeth Caballero and Michael Fabiano.

At the door of the makeshift shop—a small music classroom with a covered grand piano pushed into the back corner— is a half-finished gown Alissa Anderson will wear as Tisbe, one of Cinderella's stepsisters. Hibbert and her workers have been putting in 12-hour days creating new outfits like this one in addition to altering dresses, pants, jackets and more from Hib bert's costume collection.

The repertory nature of the summer season is a strain on the costume shop, which juggles hundreds of pieces from three historical eras at once. Hibbert brought many costumes from her Maine home to Princeton to use in La Traviata, but she and her crew have made most of the pieces for the other two productions, including dozens of intricate ball gowns.

After the initial rush to get the first two productions open, the costume staff then finished the final show—by far the most demanding, Hibbert says—during the day, while staffing the performances at night.

"The biggest problem is each director feels they are directing the only opera," Hibbert says.

Barry Steele has felt this push and pull, too. Lighting all three shows, he balances the wishes of each production against the others' needs. "The art is in managing the resources," he says, "so everybody gets what they need and nobody feels jilted."

The wings and fly space of McCarter's Berlind Theatre resemble a pack rat's attic, jammed with Cinderella's hearth, tables from the Merry Widow's nightclub and Violetta's death bed.

There are four tons of scenery, drops and lights hanging on all but four of the theater's 39 overhead rails. Parked at the loading dock are three yellow 24-foot Penske rental trucks filled with chairs, stairs, scenery flats and carved railings.

During performances, pieces are stowed on the dock, in the freight elevator, in the hallways outside the dressing rooms. Afterward, the scenery is loaded onto the trucks, which are parked off-site.

For this, the company's fifth summer season, Altman decided to bolster the scenic elements to match the improved artistry on stage. Rather than build the scenery—and build it knowing it will be used in rotation -- the company has rented whole packages from Shreveport, LA, Norfolk, VA, and Binghamton, NY. None was built for the Berlind's specs, and none was meant to be toted on and off the stage night after night.

Much of the scenery is old and some of it needed to be re-rigged before being hung on the rails. Stage supervisor Matt Pilsner and his crew of 10 worked 14- to 16-hour shifts for 13 of July's first 15 days to get the first two productions on their feet.

There was little time for tech rehearsals because La Traviata and La Cenerentola opened back to back. The sets for The Merry Widow were unloaded for the first time July 11, a week before the show opened.

Despite problems in rehearsal, the shows opened smoothly. The first two productions were warmly received by local press, which stressed the vocal talent over production values.

The Star-Ledger's Bradley Bambarger wasn't impressed by the conservative designs of the traditional sets, but he praised Leah Wool's Cinderella. The critic writing in the Philadelphia Inquirer didn't think the "mostly borrowed" sets were on par with the musical talent, but the Courier Post said, "Visually and vocally, (the) premiere marked a big step forward."

And the growth will continue. Next year, the company plans to stage Gilbert & Sullivan's The Mikado in the Matthews Theater, McCarter's 1,100-seat venue, with Donizetti's Lucia di Lammermoor and Mozart's Abduction from the Seraglio sharing the 380-seat Berlind.

There will be hiccups as the company grows and pushes its limits in other ways. And that's to be expected.

"I always assume everything is going to come together," says Levin, just hours before appearing in La Traviata. "Nothing is perfect in live theater—that's what's so fun about it."

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