Where Do You Get Your Ideas?

Mozart’s opera Idomeneo has beautiful music and one of the world’s silliest plots. I much prefer his La Clemenza di Tito, which is one of my favorite operas. Idomeneo is the king of Crete (which, for the benefit of those of anyone who slept through geography, is an island in the Mediterranean). On his way home from the Trojan war–I was a Trojan slave girl, but presumably I’d been sent home earlier–his ship is caught in a storm and he vows to Poseidon to sacrifice the first person he sees if he makes it safely home. Unfortunately, that turns out to be his son Idamante. Idomeneo spends the rest of the opera trying to get out of the deal, including his brilliant idea of sending Idamante away to Greece. You’re on an island, you’ve vowed to sacrifice your son to the sea god, and you’re planning to send him to safety by ship?

Poseidon, however, is the god of something else in addition to the sea. His is also known as Poseidon Earth-Shaker, which was particularly apropos on the evening of October 17. It was about 5 p.m., and I was about to get ready to leave for the opera house when the floor started shaking. Most of our earthquakes are minor (the typical Californian’s response to an earthquake is to look around and ask “did we just have an earthquake?”), but this one was big enough to get a name: Loma Preita. There was no performance that night, and the remaining ones were done concert style in an auditorium, which meant that they didn’t need supers and I got to attend one and sit through the entire performance instead of spending a little while on stage and a lot of time in the supers’ dressing room.

By the second time I appeared in La Gioconda, I could no longer pass for a young boy, so I was part of the group of townspeople celebrating the results of a regatta. Another advantage of this was that I was in the first act, instead of the third, so my night ended earlier.

In fact, now that I think of it, I don’t believe there was any opera I was in where I had to stay until the end. I was in the last scene of Das Rheingold, but it was at the very beginning of the scene, and then the supers were done for the night.

Khovanschina is a Russian opera, and the director wanted to fill the stage with Russian peasants. There weren’t enough people in the chorus, so he added a lot of supers and made certain that we learned to lip-snyc what the chorus was singing. Since it was in Russian, most supers had no clue what they were saying; one of my fellow supers said, “It sounds like we’re singing ‘Bolshoi idiot’,” and I replied, “We are, but it doesn’t mean what it sounds like.” I don’t begin to speak Russian, but I did pick up a few phrases in the course of the production.

One of the first things I noticed about operas (back when we studied Madama Butterfly in junior high school) was that the soprano usually dies in the end. This had been true of the three operas I had appeared in so far: I believe the count was two suicides and one death from what I called “sopranoitis”–there’s no real cause of death; she just dies. But in this opera, almost everybody dies. The exception was the people who had been executed in the historical incident on which the opera was based–in the opera the Tsar suddenly appeared and pardoned them, which was not what happened in real life. At the end of the opera the soprano walked into a burning building to die for her faith, taking the tenor with her, while most of the main characters had been murdered earlier. The peasants, however, survived to sing (or lip-sync) another day.

The call time is when a person is expected to be at the opera house. Depending on the number of supers and the complexity of their costumes and make-up, their call time may be as early as two hours before curtain. Madama Butterfly doesn’t have as many supers as some other operas, but the make-up took a while to do. After all, I had to be transformed from this: 

to this: and that took quite a while. (I’ll put up an album with the full sequence on my Facebook Page.)

And then, like the filk song about Woad, there’s the fun of getting all the make-up off your skin. Not only was my face made up, but so was a good portion of my chest–to allow for the V-neck of the kimono–and my hands and arms up to my elbows. After the first dress rehearsal I stupidly dashed home with the make-up still on instead of using the special make-up remover in the dressing room to remove it.

Operatic singing is very hard work; singers don’t use microphones and they have to be heard all the way to the back seats in the top balcony over an orchestra located between them and the audience. The stage lights are hot, and the costumes are generally heavy, so the make-up is designed to stay on. It does. Soap and water will not remove it. I don’t think cold cream will, either. On that memorable night, one of my housemates and I spent two hours and used half of a large jar of Vaseline to get most of it off. Naturally the next time I was in the dressing room I picked up the make-up remover and read the ingredients. It turned out that a major one was chamomile. Given the amount of make-up I needed to remove, I simply took a shower using chamomile shampoo as soon as I got out of costume for the rest of the season. It worked quite well.

I appeared in Manon Lescaut twice, in the Fall seasons of 1983 and 1988. In the third act, Manon, the heroine, is deported to Louisiana, accompanied by a handful of supernumeraries. The prison sergeant loading us on the ship is not supposed to be gentle, but what happened to me in rehearsal in 1983 was just an unfortunate accident. The way it was supposed to work was that after I flung myself, pleading, to my knees in front of him he was supposed to grab my upper arms (which frequently left me with a good set of the singer’s fingerprints), pull me to my feet, and shove me in the direction of the ship’s gangplank. On this particular occasion the production assistant standing in for the singer lifted me only partway and shoved before I had my feet under me. I went sprawling backward, trying to tuck my chin so my head wouldn’t slam into the floor–an effort that was less than successful. I hit hard enough to skin both elbows, through the two sweatshirts I was wearing, and to get a case of whiplash. As the director scolded me for overacting I picked myself up and limped onto the ship. When we next got a break I explained to the super captain that I had not been acting hurt and got a couple of painkillers from him. Fortunately supers are paid (it was $2 per rehearsal at the time), so I was covered under the opera’s workers comp policy. My chiropractor said she never had so much fun with a workers comp claim in her life; “Cause of injury: thrown across stage while being deported to Louisiana.”

By the time I did the part again five years later, I knew enough to tell anyone doing the sergeant’s part to make sure my weight was on my feet before shoving me, so I got through the season free of injury.

As I mentioned in my last post, there’s a certain amount of joking around during rehearsals. After we all get loaded onto the ship, the Cavaliere des Grieux, sung in that production by Ermanno Mauro, persuades the captain to take him on as a cabin boy so he can go with Manon. The third act ends with him running up the gangplank and onto the ship to clasp Manon in his arms. Nobody is supposed to be singing at this point–the very end of the act is orchestral. Mr. Mauro, however, clasped Mirella Freni tenderly to his breast and sang (to the tune from West Side Story) “I want to go in America!”

Given the fact that I have–at least temporarily–run out of stories to describe, I have decided to change the focus of this blog slightly and talk about the operas I have been in. After all, they have provided me with a great deal of inspiration for my stories.

I worked as a supernumerary (“super” for short), which is like being an extra in a movie, at the San Francisco Opera from 1983 to 1990. My first role was as a page boy (boy? all eight of us were girls, and I was 31 at the time) in the production of La Gioconda in the 1983 season.

Casting for supernumeraries is not like casting for a normal theatrical role. Acting ability is not the first criterion; size is. The Super Captain has notebooks with everyone’s information, including height, weight, and measurements, and casting starts with a list from the costume department. So the process starts with “we need eight pages, these are the costumes we have, who do you have that will fit into them?” Directors get involved after that. They can audition the people that will fit into the costumes and decide which ones they like best. Given my lack of acting ability, I think I got the part because I fit the costume. Fortunately it was a simple role; all I had to do was pass around a tray of drinks (actually empty goblets) at a party. My mother had used me to pass hors d’oeuvres at her parties when I was a child, and the routine was exactly the same.

The acting was easy, but there are rules for supers that have nothing to do with acting. Most of them involve the costume. Costumes tend to be elaborate, and they are always expensive. They are part of the production, just like the set and the props, and they are expected to last for decades. Even if the costume is not white and made out of expensive fabrics like the one I wore for this role, once a supers are in costume they are not allowed to sit down.

Being a super is an amazing experience, and it gives you a new appreciation for the operas you appear in. I thought I didn’t like La Gioconda, but I discovered that I actually did–and this was a real challenge when my only previous exposure to it was the “Camp Granada” song. That music is actually a ballet in the third act, and during one rehearsal the chorus starting softly singing those words. Even during rehearsal, most of the jokes aren’t loud enough for the director to hear, but anyone who thinks opera singers have no sense of humor is very much mistaken.