No Soap Radio: Opera Goes to Center Stage

Rising young opera directing star Alison Moritz makes her Santa Barbara debut with Opera Santa Barbara’s (OSB) double bill of centennial celebrating Leonard Bernstein’s Trouble in Tahiti and Douglas Moore’s backstage farce Gallantry, slotting the two-day run of one-acts at Center Stage on Friday and Saturday, April 21-22, between productions of Madama Butterfly with Syracuse Opera and a re-mounting of her original take on Candide with The Knights at Tanglewood Music Festival this summer. The production feature OSB’s Chrisman Studio Artists, the young singers who serve in supporting roles for the company’s larger operas and perform community concerts all year, in their final appearances of the season.

Moritz, who will offer a talk-back with the audience after Friday’s performance, talked about the operas over the phone earlier this week.

Q. Why do these two operas work together?

A. They’re set in same era of early 1950s and they have similar themes, although Tahiti is a more naturalistic drama while Gallantry is completely over the top. But both are exploring ways of pushing the boundaries of music and theater toward melodrama and are a little bit clever about the idea of making the genre of opera an American art form rather than an inherited European one. With Gallantry, the composer set the opera as a soap opera, almost doing a tur-duck-en sort of thing, because soaps are inspired by opera to begin with. My idea was to place it within the context of a TV sound stage with the audience as one that’s at a live TV taping. So, there’s a pre-show, and three added characters – a camera man, make-up artist, and director. That makes it even more like a backstage play within a play, kike Noises Off or Birdman, where you see the bones of how theater gets made and witness the on-screen and off-screen dramas.

In Tahiti, the thing that’s more subversive is that Bernstein is adapting opera to the American way of life not only with musical themes – for which he’s well-known in musical theater – but also domestic ones. He’s saying that the tragedies of opera don’t have to be giant historical dramas, or the stuff of legends. Everyday small tragedies also work – going to the movies with your wife, or whether you’re a good parent. Especially since they can’t really communicate about their issues. Everyday trials and disappointments deserve to be treated with great pathos and musical dignity. Bernstein explores the idea of two middle-class parents in suburbia as the American Adam and Eve, where biting into the apple of commercialism – which keeps getting drummed into their heads via the chorus doing radio-style jingles about how great it is in the suburbs – doesn’t make them any happier or wiser than when they began. So, they’re both about façades, either real or self-imposed.

How has producing these works in the Trump Era affected your viewpoint?

A. It’s difficulty to squarely address economic issues within the plot because they weren’t designed to. If I pushed that agenda, it would be not in service to the piece. But what is very telling, especially in Tahiti, is the idea of our view of masculinity, how men are raised to not express their emotions, and the costs to both genders from that disenfranchising. That’s a central theme of the opera, and it’s coming to the forefront once again – the issue of true, open, candid communication between the sexes. It’s a perpetual challenge.

I believe this is OSB’s debut at Center Stage. How does an intimate black-box space alter the approach?

The pieces require a more intimate style of acting, simply because it doesn’t have to travel hundreds of feet to cover the stage, so it feels more like you’re at a keyhole looking in at a private moment. In Tahiti, we are making use of it by stripping away any kind of artifice, exposing that they are living in a theatrical petri dish. It’s emotional realism rather than scenic.

A piano replaces a full orchestra. Does that allow for artistic freedom or present challenges?

We’re in a wonderful moment with opera across the country, in terms of experimenting with alternative spaces, instrumentation, and more. We’re taking opera out of its lock box and letting it speak to anyone’s experiences. It’s great to explore how we can create opera in diverse places and methods so audiences can see it right up close, and taking it back to the essentials: What do you need to simply tell the story?

(OSB performs Trouble in Tahiti and Gallantry at 7:30 pm April 21-22 at Center Stage Theater in Paseo Nuevo. General admission tickets cost $35. Call 963-0408 or visit www.CenterStageTheater.org.)