Opera in the Domain Or Taking a risk and taking a bow

It’s my first Mazda Opera in the Domain on this Saturday 29 Jan. I haven’t done Domain before so it’s exciting. This week we have been squeezing in extra rehearsals of Carmen to reblock the show – to map out all the moves in other words -- for the Domain stage. There will still be plenty of costumes and flamenco action. Just this time I get to do my best dance moves in front of thousands of people!

Luckily for me, I don’t suffer too much from nerves. In fact, the feeling is not so much nerves as adrenalin. You are extraordinarily concentrated when you are on stage. There is no let up of energy and your mind and your body are full of adrenalin.

By the time you get on stage you know the role, but then it’s just a matter of whether you produce the goods at the right moment. Most of my time on stage feels like second nature – I have worked the music so much that it's perfect and flows with ease. But then there is the 10% where I go have to go to a different level of concentration and really focus on the music to make sure I nail it.

I’ve done a few arena style performances, though I’ve never sung in the Domain. There’s always a great buzz, though when you look out it’s just a sea of faces, a wash of people. In the end, you still do the same thing, you still give it all you’ve got whether you are singing to one person or thousands.

People ask me whether I love the applause. I don’t know. Applause is a strange thing really. I get really embarrassed taking an individual bow. I know this sounds awful, but I sometimes wish they would just drop the curtain so I can go home.

What I do enjoy is taking applause as a group, as a whole. It’s humbling and wonderful to hear an audience really express themselves. When you hear them cheering, you know they’ve really had a great time, and that the performance has inspired them to express their feelings, to shout out their approval.

And that’s what entertainment and art and music and song is. It is an expression of who we are as people and it enables us to express ourselves in ways that we might not be able to in the

normal course of life.

See you at Mazda Opera in the Domain!

Carmen begins Or Escamillo’s finest moment - NOT

So…Carmen begins. We’re up and running and it feels great to be back on the Opera House stage.

It’s a wonderful production, vibrant and vivacious and real, with a fantastic cast, full of great singers and actors. As for Rinat Shaham, she’s wonderful, so energised. Like Carmen, I guess.

I play Escamillo, the bull-fighter, who steals Carmen’s heart from Don José. He’s a smooth character. Or thinks he’s a smooth character. He’s all show, and you see very little soul. But Carmen obviously sees something in him…

My favourite bits in Carmen are the big ensemble pieces. The Opera Australia Chorus are always so fantastic. They all give their own performance and then it all comes together as a one. The ensemble scenes and Act 1 and 2 are just brilliant. In fact, it’s a hard act to follow when I have to come on and do the Toreador’s Song… I have a few moves too, but I feel a poor cousin to the flamenco dancers, I can assure you.

There are dangers to dancing too! I was doing my flamenco dance in rehearsal a few weeks go. It all takes place in a bar, and everyone is dancing on the tables. Escamillo has this big suave move just for Carmen. At that moment my foot slipped off the table and I ended up on my backside, much to the pleasure of everyone in the room. As I picked myself up, still singing, I dropped in the words ‘did you like that?’ None of us could sing after that!

Escamillo is a big part of the story but he doesn’t actually spend that much time on stage, compared to Carmen and his rival, Don José. But when he does, it is always a big dramatic moment. Escamillo’s most famous number is the Toreador’s Song, and he gets to wear the toreador’s ‘suit of lights’ in the parade towards the end of the show.

The suit of lights costume is spectacular. It’s quite heavy and restricting. It certainly keeps your upper body taut and straight and postured. I guess it’s a bit like a suit of armour, although, quite frankly, not being a bull-fighter myself, I’m not sure how much good it would do against a charging bull! But with the cheering and singing and dancing and that brilliant parade music, which is a sort of medley of all the hits in the show, it's not hard to feel the part.

Who needs directors?

'Who needs directors? They are so often misinterpreting the way opera should be - carelessly, willfully, ripping a composer’s work out of the period in which he set it, just to egotistically, even narcissistically, put his or her perverse stamp on a treasured work of art.'

'Conductors are much nicer really, or if not nice, more respectful. Sure, they might play with the odd tempo, but they don’t destroy a work of art by removing it from its period. A few decades ago, they even advocated going back to the harpsichord to play Bach or Handel, rather than use the overblown dynamics of a romantic piano. Now that’s respect! The concert hall is a much safer place than the opera theatre.'

Extreme views perhaps, but of all the artistic issues that confront us, the subject of 'Director's Opera', or more particularly the issue of setting productions out of the time in which the composer or librettist set them, is by far the most persistently contentious. Perhaps it's a pity that an opera, or a play, cannot be like a painting or a good book. ('Why can’t a woman be more like a man?') We don't need anyone to do our interpreting for us when we look at a picture, or read War and Peace. Tolstoy knew what he wanted; and we know what we want when we read him; it’s all so simple really. And if we do want another person’s interpretation of War and Peace, we take our argument 'outside' – we put the book down and argue with our friends in our local reading group. We argue with them, that is, not with the book! The book remains itself, complete, untouched and undiminished by the insensibility of a 'mistaken' reader. Not like being held captive by someone else in the opera theatre, who, after all, is neither the composer, the librettist or us - who thinks he knows what's best, who tries to tell us how we should 'see' a work of art. With opera we take our arguments 'inside', into the heated arena of the theatre itself, because directing is, by its nature, argumentative, trying to persuade us of how we should experience a work.

I exaggerate of course, but the fear of a director's power over that which they have learned to hold dear is ever-present among many opera lovers.

Directors are unsettling precisely because we need them to realize an opera – a singular act of interpretation - but they start the conversation without us; and by the time we join they have hijacked our response.

As for the outcry about updated productions? Experience tells me that this is something of fall-back position when someone simply does not 'like' a production. For example, I have had no letters of complaint about Elijah Moshinsky's productions of Rigoletto or La traviata, both of which are set well outside their 'intended' periods. I certainly can't recall anything but approbation for Moffatt Oxenbould's production of Madama Butterfly, which is so subtly influenced by Japanese custom but a far cry from the 'realistic' interpretations of most Butterflys that we have seen. Baz Luhrmann's production of La boheme, set in the 1950s, or his radical shifting of Britten's A Midsummer Night’'s Dream to colonial India, live as vividly in the collective memory of our Company as they did when they inspired audiences in the early 90s.

All of which makes me think that the real issue is not about whether a Director has the temerity to update or dislodge a work from its intended setting. It's much more about the value of their interpretation once the transgression has been committed. If, as the years and centuries move on, we stuck slavishly to a set period for each master work of the repertoire, then the essential conversation we have with these great works would stultify beyond rescue. But if a Director chooses to set an opera or play out of its imagined milieu, he or she better have a very good reason for doing so – because the nuances of an imagined setting are so often what give depth to an otherwise banal perception.

No, I really believe it's not about updating or not updating; rather it's about productions that work and others that don't. When we don't like a production that has been 'updated', it’s usually something else we are objecting to.

Carmen...or never work with animals, children or dancers

My next production is Carmen at the Sydney Opera House in January. It's coming up fast. I play Escamillo, the bull-fighter and I have a few scenes where I have to dance.

Many people won't know that I actually did a year of dance lessons. I took myself off many, many years ago to a jazz class for a year in my home town of Christchurch. And when I was covering Danilo in The Merry Widow in San Francisco I also got private dance lessons for about four or five months, learning how to waltz properly.

But no. Dancing is not my forte. As many will tell you.

So with my next role involving quite a bit of dancing, I'm up in the rehearsal studios. Luckily, the director for Carmen, Matthew Barclay, actually trained as a dancer, and he's getting started on my dancing early. Probably wise.

I'm also working on getting Escamillo's music back into my body. Even though I've done it 50 or 60 times it still takes a while to get the sound you want back into your vocal chords.

I use a vocal coach wherever I'm working. You need someone outside of your head, because you can get carried away and be singing away, thinking you sound fantastic, but the coach is sitting there shaking their head and saying "Jeez, Teddy…"

It's great being in Melbourne as I work with a mate of mine, Tahu Matheson, one of the vocal coaches on the Opera Australia music staff. He's an awesome musician.  We have a laugh as Tahu is 10 years younger than me but is telling me what does and doesn't sound good! Actually, the best thing is that we collaborate. We both have an input which is a great way to work. Hopefully we learn something from each other.

The other big challenge in this production is Escamillo's dramatic entrance on a big black horse. But apparently Rinat Shaham, who plays Carmen, is allergic to horses, and we don't want to completely sabotage her voice, so I'm off the hook!

I have to admit I look pretty average on a horse. I had lessons, and I have actually ridden a horse in a in a big outdoor arena production of Carmen in Christchurch. It was in a huge football field, and we had Mark Todd, the New Zealand Olympian horse-riding champion, leading on a parade of horses at the start of the opera. It was an amazing experience, with big thoroughbreds riding through the stadium.

With an allergic Carmen, I think the Escamillo's black stallion is cut for the first run of performances but I have been told that the horse will be back for all performances after 19 February.


Image: from Opera Australia's 2008 season of Carmen at the Sydney Opera House