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Twilight near Cedar Rapids

OSCEOLA, IA - The tour resumed today with a day at Clarke Community High School in Osceola, a town that, in spite of its being only about 40 miles south of Indianola, is several degrees more rural. In fact, even to consider Indianola as "rural" at this point is almost laughable. To give you an idea of how desolate this corner of the Earth is, a perfunctory glance at a map of Iowa showed roughly five towns in the same county as Osceola. Some people might be better able to grasp the reality of this situation through the fact that America Online, my backup way of entry to the Internet, doesn't have any access numbers in the area that qualify as local calls. For perhaps the first time on this tour, I literally feel like I may be in the middle of nowhere. Not that "nowhere" is necessary a bad place, though - today was unquestionably one of the more memorable and enjoyable days of work that we have had on the entire tour.

On our first day of work after vacation, we were thrust into the rare situation that had us performing Three Little Pigs in the morning and then the short Così in the afternoon. We had never had an extended hiatus before, so we anticipated some rough edges. If life's flavor resides in its unexpected variations, then today was a tasty day. Pigs featured such highlights as an extended interpolated high note from me that was, in my own words, of "indeterminate pitch," a subsequent scene change that was so late that it might have merited a detention from the school principal, a gimpy Big Bad Wolf slowed by a pinched nerve in his ankle, and a curtain call that I almost inadvertantly skipped.

The hijinx continued in the afternoon with the abbreviated Così. Our audience of adolescents was subjected to a first scene replete with nonsensical words and phrases, and one singer in the quartet refrained from singing along with me for the piece's final sixteen measures. After the first phrase I unexpectedly had to sing on my own, she turned to me and gave me what I thought was a sly and knowing smile. When she failed to come in for the next phrase, I realized that, indeed, sometimes a smile is just a smile. I started poking her in the back at that point, much as a cowpoke might dig his spurs into his steed, but it was soon clear to me that I was destined to finish the music on my own. We exited the scene, and I asked her what happened. She looked at me, paused, and then burst out laughing because, until that precise moment, she had no idea that anything had been unusual.

The delight in all of this is that our high school audience today for Così was, without a doubt, one of our most responsive audiences all season. They laughed continuously throughout the show, and it was clear that they were with us every step of the way. Feeding on the positive energy from the kids, our question-and-answer session following Così was a veritable lovefest. The kids asked terrific questions, and we responded in kind with some of our wittiest and most informative replies of the campaign. When it was my turn at the microphone, I took a moment to introduce Pitt, who until that point had been going very quietly through his 24th birthday. Using my best Bar Mitzvah DJ voice, I succeeded in getting the high schoolers to join us in singing "Happy Birthday" to him.

In spite of the various imperfections in our performance today, I could not have been more pleased with the outcome. Some performers make the mistake of being overly concerned with assessing the quality of their individual performances, rather than first addressing the far more important question of whether the audience was entertained. On that count, today was an indisputable success. The kids actively viewed the opera as a living work of art, rather than looking at it curiously as a dead artifact from a bygone era. If the children of this world's metropolitan hubs are as culturally progressive and sophisticated as these kids are in the rural Midwest, there may be hope for the future of opera, after all.

Posted: Mon - March 21, 2005 at 10:14 PM      

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