Curmudgeon
Los Angeles
Old Lady Brady — 2 years ago
When I first moved to Tulsa from rural North Louisiana for college, I was cautiously optimistic about living in a city that had its own opera company. Optimistic: Having been passionate about opera for half of my 18-1/2 years at that time, I had had to drive or to arrange to be driven at least 20, and more often 50 miles, to see the mere 15 locally staged live productions I had managed to get to. Cautious: My unfounded prejudice about the city of Tulsa influenced me to expect productions there of dubious artistic merit. Happily, I was wrong.
It was here at “Old Lady Brady” that I first attended a show by the Tulsa Opera: Giacomo Puccini’s Tosca with Maralin Niska in the title role. I found it riveting and was pleased that in my first few months away in college, I had managed to recruit about a half dozen new friends into attending with me. One drawback to the (1914) design of the theatre was that our view of the stage from our back orchestra seats was obstructed by the projecting balcony overhead. When the curtain rose on Act One, the painter Cavaradossi was up on scaffolding at work. For the first portion of the scene, we were entertained by singing boots, until he descended and we got to see his mouth in motion.
SPOILER: At the conclusion of the opera, of course, Tosca climbs to the top of the parapet of Rome’s Castel San Angelo, shouts ”Scarpia, avanti a Dio!” — “Scarpia, (we’ll meet) before God!” — and leaps to her death. As the heroine mounted the steps towards her final utterance and doom, we saw less and less of her. Imagine this row of ORU students all spontaneously ducking and throwing our heads into each other’s laps in order to watch that fateful moment, when she hurled herself into space.
One year later, I was singing in the Tulsa Opera Chorus. We performed Jules Massenet’s Manon. During the final staging and dress rehearsals, I observed that the wing space was so limited that the stage crew had to fold the enormous flats and haul them into the alley behind the theatre—praying it wouldn’t rain—when changing scenes. Limited space also made things difficult for the chorus, especially the women. Our dressing rooms were up a narrow flight of stairs; the lady-choristers, who were costumed in voluminous 18th century hoopskirts and wigs, had to use one hand to clasp their gowns close to their bodies, another hand to clasp their wigs close to their heads, and a third hand to hold onto the railing, every time they made a trip to or from the dressing room. And once assembled in the wings, while waiting for their musical cue to enter the stage, they had to stand in a huddled, wrinkling mass to avoid obstructing the view and activities of the stagehands.
But for me, it was all very exciting and cozy. A la “six degrees of separation,” I was never more than a handful of bodies away from one or the other of several bona fide opera stars, a couple of whom I had heard through the years in the live Saturday broadcasts of performances from the Metropolitan Opera in New York. Judith Blegen was our Manon; Kenneth Riegel, Des Grieux; William Parker, Lescaut; Antonio de Almeida, conductor. As a French major, I was thrilled to be singing in a French opera. And when I learned that William Parker had studied in Paris with Pierre Bernac, I sought him out to talk with. We developed a friendship and corresponded for a number of years.
Manon was the company’s last production in the Brady Theater. The new Performing Arts Center was scheduled to open by the following season, and we all told ourselves what a relief it would be to perform in a proper facility.
(Please see Shreveport > Civic Theatre for a story about Curmudgeon’s introduction to opera. Also, Curmudgeon finds himself with only 1 degree of separation between himself and a world-famous lieder singer at Centre Artistique de Piégon.)
