Influenza

I'm feeling much better. This flu has been brutal over at the opera house! Angela Brown and Renzo Zulian (playing Radames) were both sick with it all during tech week, and they both went MIA during the final (invited) dress. Oh yeah, and they don't have covers at Philly Opera. There was a last minute replacement for Aida: Lisa Daltirus, who sang the role at Opera Delaware last spring, went on stage for the dress and it looked like she had been there the whole time. She was amazing.

For the dress, they flew someone in from Columbus, OH, to sing Radames, but he didn't have it memorized, so he sat on the side of the stage and read from the score while everyone pretended he was on stage. Clearly that wouldn't do for opening night, though, and both Angela and Renzo were sick for opening night, too. They found a really good tenor, though, who had randomly auditioned for something else and happened to use "Celeste Aida" as his audition aria. The director said, "Do you know the role?" To which he replied, "I just covered it this fall at Chicago Lyric." What luck! After 6 hours of rehearsal, he was in costume and on stage for opening night. He got rave reviews, too.

So I thought this mystery tenor's name was Don Juan Shin, which I thought was the silliest name in the world. But apparently, his name is Dongwon Shin, which makes much more sense. He certainly doesn't look like a Don Juan; this short, squat Korean guy hardly looks like a romantic lead. But he did a good job, both on opening night and the following performance, when Renzo was still out.

The third performance, Renzo came back, but the director made an announcement that he was "95% recovered." Yeah, make that 5% recovered. He sounded like ass doing "Celeste Aida." And when I say ass, I mean ass. Like it hurt to listen to him sing. So after the first act, there was a frantic "Wardrobe and Mr. Shin to stage right" call over the intercom, and Dongwon (I still think of him as Don Juan) played out the rest of the opera as Radames. I felt bad for Renzo, because he didn't really get a chance to sing the role very many times.

Finally, last Sunday, Renzo was back to his normal self, and sounded fine, and all was well with the world. Oh, except for the fact that almost the entire chorus had contracted the flu and were dropping like flies. One girl fainted in the dressing room on opening night, and another one had to leave the stage on a different night. The supers, too, have been fainting on and off stage. It's stupid, but of course we come to the theater sick, and then we pass it around so easily when we're all packed like sardines in the tiny wing space singing off stage.

Now Josh and Jill are sick, and it's all my fault. Strangely, Ray has avoided the bug (knock on wood), and I think if he was going to get it, he would have gotten it by now.

The Ghost of Death is Upon Me, and So I Flail

I managed to get the flu, and I happen to concurrently be singing in John Adams's The Death of Klinghoffer, which is a contemporary piece based on the story of the 1985 hijacking by Palestinian terrorists of the cruise ship, Achille Lauro, in which Leon Klinghoffer was the only passenger who died, but he happened to be a Jewish American in a wheelchair, and they threw him overboard. Anyway, the music was very hard to learn, and we were totally under-rehearsed. And I, of course, managed to get sick the week of dress rehearsals and the performance. I was running a 100-degree fever and trying to eke out very difficult rhythms and intervals, and I did not appreciate being yelled at (the conductor was really yelling at the chorus as a whole) for not knowing the music very well. And we had two performances of Aida that week, too: a high stress situation, even when you're not sick.

I managed to make it through the concert without fainting, although I did keep a wad of tissues in my sleeve during the performance and kept surreptitiously dabbing my nose whenever I wasn't singing and blowing my nose when the music got loud. Basically, all week, I kept to my bed during the day, and about 2 PM I would force myself to get up and take a shower, pop a few Advil to break the fever, and go to rehearsal/performance. Afterwards, I would drive home and collapse into bed. As a result, I think I've been sick longer than I probably would have been if I had just stayed in bed the whole time.

Mr. Malaprop, Part Deux

So my friend of the malapropisms has struck again. He sent out a very serious email talking about how the son of his friend just died of cancer. But this is a line that had me snickering at the image it conjured up (not to mention the really confusing grammar at the beginning of the sentence):

I know the how many times that as [name withheld] and I
passed in the shire I hugged her and hopped to impart
some strength to her.

Um, I don't know about you, but whenever I impart strength to people, I like to hop. It's really the most effective way to show that I really care. In fact, I'm hopping right now, just for you. Okay, I've stopped hopping, because my leg is tired.

In case you haven't guessed, I'm a little punchy because I just got back from a long day of singing. I had a dress rehearsal in the afternoon; then I had to rush to church to sing for the Ash Wednesday service. So I'm pooped and just a little bit silly.

Ravings of a Madwoman

I have performed in seven concerts since November and am currently in rehearsals for Aida as well as a concert version of John Adams's opera, The Death of Klinghoffer. I'm a crazy woman!

Remember how I mentioned Zul was being an ass in New York? I had totally forgotten about it until last week when he called me to apologize for being an ass. Really weird. Anyway, then he starts telling me that I should audition for this guy or that guy, etc., because he's involved in those groups, and he thinks it would be really good for me. Why does he think he knows what's good for me? And he called me a couple of times the next day to talk about this gig that we were doing together, which I actually ended up backing out of because it wasn't enough money. One of my friends thinks he's stalking me. I don't think he's stalking, exactly, but it kind of sounds like he's really lonely and has nobody to talk to.

Meanwhile, Aida rehearsals have been going on. Aida opens on Friday, and both the soprano and tenor leads are sick with the flu. We had a final dress today with last-minute covers that they came in literally this morning. The woman covering Aida had done the role before, so she went on stage with the blocking and everything. The guy playing Radames (the love interest), who was flown in from Ohio, wasn't comfortable with doing the blocking, so he stayed on the side singing with a music stand, and everybody acted around an invisible Radames on stage. It reminded me of that Once On This Island performance when our Ti Moune lost her voice and I had to sing from the pit while she mouthed from the stage.

Every day is another pain-in-the-ass rehearsal where there are too many people backstage and everybody gets yelled at. We'll get a call on the intercom that says, "Chorus women to stage left" so we can sing our offstage "Possente Ptha" doo-da, and we all get there, and the stage hands aren't done changing the set. So the ASM yells at us and tells us to go in the green room until they're ready for us. Then we go into the green room, and people yell at us for being too loud (because the green room opens up onto stage left, and you can hear everything on stage if the door is open). Then they finally tell us to get into place stage left, but they yell at us because we're not going fast enough. And then Elbows can't see the monitor very well, so she can't tell when Maestro Rovaris is starting, and inevitably, she comes in late and doesn't cue the soloist, who's like, "Where are we?" Then the ASMs come over and say, "The director wants to know what happened," and instead of saying, "Sorry, my bad," she blames it on the poor harpist.

Argh.



And we get to wear body makeup, so it looks like I've been to the Bahamas for a month. Today's Ash Wednesday, and we have an afternoon final dress today, so I have to book it from the theater to church. I'm going to have to take a shower at the theater, because I won't have time to go home, and I don't want to go to church looking like a mulatto from the arms up. My makeup is called "Dark Egyptian," but it really doesn't make me look black.



I had my Bach audition on Sunday. It went okay, but I totally got nervous right as I walked in the room, and I just tightened up. I sang all the notes and the words right, but I couldn't really resonate very well because the solos sit right on my break, and even though I just spent three weeks working with my teacher to get me to break all my bad habits for this audition, my bad habits crept right back up and it just wasn't good. I mean, it wasn't bad, but it wasn't my best. So we'll see.