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Opera on a Shoestring
| Article
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19732 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
Date : |
3 / 1991 |
1,786 Words |
| Author
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David H. Ehrlich
David H. Ehrlich, an avid theatergoer, is an independent
writer based in Washington, D.C. He has previously written
numerous essays for The World & I. |
Imagine an opera company that can mount three performances of a fully staged eighteenth-century work, using professional soloists and a twenty-five-man professional orchestra in New York City--and do it for only $35,000--in the year 1991. Think it's possible?
Many observers have had doubts, but two audacious young New Yorkers have done just that. For the last three years their company, L'Opera Francais, has done one production annually. This season, they intend to double the repertoire.
L'Opera Francais was born in the autumn of 1988 when Yves Abel, a graduate of the Mannes School of Music, came to a parting of the ways with another company, with which he had contracted to stage a performance of Charles Gounod's Romeo et Juliette. In some distress, he called upon Susan Melvoin, his neighbor across the hall. "This magnificent score won't get out of my head. And now that it's there, I must perform it. But I don't have singers anymore, and I don't have a place or an orchestra. What am I going to do?"
Melvoin, a full-time schoolteacher, would-be playwright, and mezzo-soprano, pondered a moment and answered, "I think I have just the place. You conduct from the piano and I'll handle the stage direction. Just let me sing the part of the Nurse, and we've got a deal."
A Mere $5,000
Melvoin's idea was to use the auditorium of the Town School, a 75-year-old private school overlooking the East River, where she has taught French, drama, history, and English for the past ten years. And she did not hesitate to volunteer the enthusiasm (and the labor) of some of the school's three hundred-plus students and their parents. The cost of that initial production was a mere $5,000.
Flushed with their initial success, the excited pair asked each other, "What else in the French opera literature can we do?" Although both Abel and Melvoin are North Americans, both are fluent in French. And they are also gifted musically and imbued with the determination of youth and the confidence that they can turn out something worthwhile.
Abel and Melvoin perceived a void in the New York opera market that involved both programming and scale. They decided that the Metropolitan and New York City Opera companies are just too big and too "safe." Various pressures lock them into doing
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