Explanation (NOT POLITICAL!) For My Friend

Or, Still Stage-Struck After All These Years

Last night I texted a friend out West that I am currently obsessed with “The Phantom of the Opera” (which I also mentioned in my recent “Books in Northport” post). She texted back that she never saw the show, doesn’t know the story line or setting, and is not crazy in general about drama, though she did acknowledge that the music and costumes and set in the link I sent her (“The Music of the Night”) were beautiful. 

 

My friend and the rest of you, I have never seen the show, either! I’ve never seen a performance of anything in the old Opera in Paris (but I have been inside the front doors to see the staircase and have seen photo images and one filmed performance from the more modern Opera de la Bastille; the opera part of the post comes after the livestock auction part). Until I began listening to the musical numbers in order, however, I had no more of the story line than you! And yes, opera is dramatic.

 

I didn’t care at all for opera when I was young, though my parents both loved it and had many long-playing vinyl 78rpm recordings of opera. But I loved music. And the stage—I fell in love with the stage at age 14 when (on the first date I had with the boy driving rather than one of his his parents) I saw my first live production. The play, not a musical, was “The Curious Savage,” with high school students playing the parts, and when the final curtain came down I did not want to leave my seat. I was stage-struck!

 

Luckily, I played violin in the high school orchestra, so for four years it was my good fortune to be in the pit orchestra for every rehearsal and every performance of each year's high school “operetta,” as we called it. The first, my freshman year, was “Show Boat.” Well before the last performance was over, I knew all the lines and lyrics by heart, and of course I never wanted that show to be over! The student who sang Paul Robeson’s “Ol’ Man River” was, for me, the star, and it is his performance I remember best, but the entire production was incredibly thrilling—and I was a part of it! A very modest, practically invisible part, but I have never forgotten it, and it still gives me shivers. 

 

There were other operettas and other stage plays, and in some of the plays I was onstage, most notably as the old gypsy woman in “Camino Real,” by Tennessee Williams, a production our high school took up through various contest levels, competing with other high school thespians, eventually to win first in state. That did it! I dreamed of New York and studying theatre and going on the live stage. But sic transit all that, and so I’ll cut ahead in time here….

 

(Opera still had not grabbed me.)

 

I sang blues in a club for a while and, in a different time period, earlier, studied voice with a private teacher, but time was slipping away, and I was studying philosophy and at the same time turning to quieter, more pastoral dreams. Then one day, making my bed out in an old farmhouse in Barry County, listening to the radio, I was stopped in my tracks and had to sit down to listen to the famous duet from “The Pearl Fishers.” Really! That was opera? Maybe I was ready to appreciate it.

 

So there are the pieces: stage-struck at age 14, four years in the pit orchestra, a role in my senior year in a play that went right to the top in our state competition, singing in a nightclub in Kalamazoo, hearing a duet that captured my heart, and finally seeing a Paris production on film, on a big screen, in Willcox, Arizona. No, there was more than that: there was a family holiday trip to Chicago for the stage version of “Camelot,” a school trip for “Oliver!” There was also our family participation in church choir, and there were my mother and sisters and I singing while we did dishes and cleaned up the kitchen after dinner. You see the influences. I could go on and add more. In general, though, music and stage, stage and music. 

 

Neither music nor the stage became my life after a certain point, but our past never completely vanishes, and I hope my heart is never so cold, soul never so dead that I do not thrill to passionate and dramatic songs from the best of my country’s composers and lyricists. Here are a few more numbers, in addition to those linked in paragraphs above, that give me goosebumps.

 

“All I Ask of You”

“The Impossible Dream”

“West Side Story” --the whole show!

(I can’t choose only one number.)

Another whole show: "Fiddler on the Roof"

I would love to see “Wicked,” but I could not put it ahead of seeing and hearing, on a live stage, “The Phantom of the Opera”--if I could survive the experience!