opera summer 2017, #3

Time sure flies when you have rehearsal every night.  zzzz .... 

Since last I wrote, I've had ... four rehearsals.  I think.  (coming back after writing: yes, four.)

Day 4 (Wednesday evening, Suor): staging the finale.  We have a short entrance and exit - most of us go out to the cemetery a little earlier in the show, so now we come back in, notice Sister Angelica is having A Moment, and we reassure her that her prayers are being heard and then we go offstage to bed.  (Actually we go offstage, sing a little bit, and then run around the outside of the church to go be angels at the back.  But there's 10 pages of music in between, so it's more of a relaxed saunter.  In nun habits.  In downtown Winnipeg.  We're gonna giggle the whole time.)  Then we have the lovely challenge of singing from the back of a church with the orchestra and soloist at the front of the church.  It's already a pain in the church we're staging in, but at least we have the ability to be as far back as we will be on the actual set - the building is shaped differently, so it doesn't quite give us the real deal, but it's a good exercise in watch the conductor's hands, don't use your ears.  It's really hard.  But we'll do it.

Day 5 (Thursday evening, Idomeneo): ahahahahahaha this was such a train wreck in so many places for me.  I knew some of the chorus numbers better than others, sure, but I definitely thought I had more of it down than I proved to.  I wasn't the only one.  It seems to be a bit of a theme - the first time you run Mozart chorus pieces, literally everything falls apart at the seams, we laugh at ourselves for a couple minutes, and then we run it again a couple times and it makes much more sense.  (The one-to-a-part quartet stuff I'm doing was 500% a train wreck ... partially because we were missing the soprano and the bass, partially because of the Mozart effect, and just partially because I need to learn my part better.)  On the plus side, though, once we all got our shit together we sound quite good.  The blend is nice.  We're gonna sound even better once we sing all the right pitches - and the right words.  Mozart scores are hell, especially the less-popular ones.  There are five million editions and a bunch of them have German overtop of the Italian in the score (a lot of German opera houses don't do operas in Italian; they do them in translation, in German - and guess where Mozart was from ... ), and the Italian in italics (ha) and often smaller text, and it's just a pain.  Does that read "ci"? "ei"? "vi"?  who the fuck knows.  (we do, now that we've gone through all the numbers and agreed on everything.)

Day 6 (Friday evening, Suor): first stumble-through!  Still no last principal, so we skipped the bit in the middle, but we successfully made it to the end of the opera without any derailments so massive we actually had to stop.  So that was good.  I personally completely effed up a couple things, but on the other hand a few things I'd been fighting with went off without a hitch, so I was happy with it.  Then I went home to bed.  

Day 7 (Saturday morning, Suor): we are now in the finessing stage.  We have the basic skeleton of the staging down (with the obvious exception of the section in the middle), so now we're going through scenes several times over and fixing what doesn't feel right, working out details, and above all paying close attention to text.  Everyone is 90-95% off book now, so we can focus on where we're going and where we're actually looking - who are we talking to? what are we talking about?  We got the note last night that we need to remember how we know things ... i.e., we know things because we saw them.  You can't relay information without first having that information, and that's a really easy thing to forget when you're on stage and you, as an actor, already know the show.  You know what has already happened, and what's going to happen because of it.  But you, as a character, do not know what's going to happen - and you don't know what's already happened to anyone but yourself (if you haven't already seen it).  I have to remember that I saw the carriage outside before I can ask about it, and I don't know already that this carriage is Sister Angelica's aunt.  It's not Big News for me - it's just a curiosity.  Don't give away the plot before it happens!  The audience wants to participate in a story, not a lecture.

I'm on a short break right now before going back for more specific one-on-one work later this afternoon.  I think I'm going to have a nap ...