There have been more than a few happy byproducts of the year+ spent at home during Pandemic Pause. One of the most meaningful in my life has been the weekly hour I now spend online with 5 former members of New Opera Theatre Ensemble, the improvisational opera company I founded and directed in Boston toward the end of the 20th Century.
Sylvie lives in New Hampshire. Vicky lives in Keene, New Hampshire, which frankly doesn't really feel like the rest of New Hampshire. Merle lives in Boston. Mary Ann lives in Northampton. And Jon lives in San Francisco. There was a time when we all lived and worked in Boston. And as former musical collaborators, gathering for one hour on Zoom each week has reconnected each of us with a part of our artistic selves we may not have accessed in quite the same way in recent years.
How best to explain this?
When you open your mouth to sing but you've no idea what pitch, rhythm or words (if even there are words) might come out it takes a special kind of letting go and trusting and allowing for what might be considered "ugly noise" to come out if it will. In my opinion it's an act that taps into one of the deepest levels of trust we can access. It implies:
I'm going to sing now and it might be ugly or boring or trite. But I know I'm in the company of love. And so anything is possible and nothing will be fatal.
The five people who join me each week for one hour of exploration and conversation are among the most remarkable and wonderful artists I know. And I wanted to just share a few bits about each one of them in the hopes that how they live their artistic lives might offer you all some inspiration.
Merle Perkins
Merle has been one of my main muses for many years. Very often when I'm writing a song, it's Merle's voice I hear in my head. She's got that gorgeous upper register clarity that reminds folks of Audra McDonald and a straightforward phrasing that reminds me most of the best work of Doris Day. Beyond her immense talent, she's also one of those rare artists who never seems to lose her cool. She so clearly loves what she's doing and that love proves contagious. A recording studio filled with the anxiety of a looming deadline takes a breath and gets centered whenever she shows up to lay down her tracks. As if that were not enough, she devotes much of her time these days to working with inner city youth through Urban Improv.
Mary Ann Lanier
Mary Ann has always felt like a great reservoir of surprises. She's under 5' tall, I think, speaks with the clarity of a classically trained opera singer (albeit without completely having erased her Georgia roots) and if you met her at a faculty meeting or a concert, you might make the mistake of assuming she'd be one of those impeccably trained but narrow-thinking risk-averse bel canto singers churned out by countless MFA programs here and abroad. But, boy would you be wrong! Mary Ann is full of surprises, often willing to explore dark and scary material long before the rest of us have caught on. And she brings many of her improvisational techniques to her classroom at Groton Academy where she directs some ensembles composed of serious prodigies who probably never would have given a second thought to the idea of free improvisation had they not crossed paths with this artist who questions everything and delights in the unexpected.
Sylvie Stewart
When I first met Sylvie it was love at first sight and the intense connection I feel with her has never waned one bit. Sylvie is that rare creature who walks into any room with eyes and ears wide open and an absolute unabashed willingness to try anything, even if it feels at first to be a poorly articulated idea. This, of course, is the key to unlocking all great creativity. If we're not able to jump in without understanding the why or the how of something, we may never achieve anything approaching greatness. Sylvie and I also connect through our shared absolute love of insane humor and she and I can probably find joy and laughter in almost anything. When we're together sometimes it's difficult to shut us up. And when we improvise musically, it is Sylvie more than anyone who I will always find has echoed back some element of what I've done or vice versa. We often arrive at some unexpected musical shift together. And it's rarely planned. The musical ideas that flow out of her always touch something deep in me that makes me want to respond. And I do.
Jon Rosenthal
The descendent of a long line of prominent European cantors, Jon could have easily ended up becoming this era's version of those great musicians of an earlier era. But for one not so tiny detail. Jon is gay. And Jon is also a fiercely devoted lover of Jazz and the great American songbook. He studied Jazz at Berklee College of Music. So whatever Jon creates often straddles these two worlds -- a deeply spiritual Jewish mystical lyrical chant and a mid-20th Century musical theatre tradition paying tribute to its African-American roots. Sometimes a person relocates to a new city and finds themselves transformed. This seems to be true for Jon who was somewhat shy and reserved when I knew him in Boston. I easily identified with what I then perceived to be a tension that lived in him between his day job as a cantor at a local synagogue and his love of cabaret, a form of creative expression that's often wrongly dismissed by classically trained singers as fluffy and unserious and by serious theatre-makers as superficial and ego-driven. Neither need be true and lately Jon seems to be proving them wrong by writing his own material and performing it at Zoom open mics from the west coast to the east coast and even as far away as Paris.
Vicky Pittman
Vicky and I met when I was directing a production of Goblin Market in Boston and she came in to audition. As is often the case with such things, for reasons I don't recall, she didn't get the part, but her voice and her deeply rooted talent as an actor made an immediate impression on me and I quickly invited her to join my opera company. Interesting to note: I could not tell you the names of the two actresses I did cast in that production of Goblin Market almost 30 years ago, but Vicky Pittman and I have kept close by as collaborators and friends for all this time. In fact, Vicky starred in the first full production that New Opera Theatre Ensemble put up. Borne out of months of interviews conducted with doctors and nurses on the frontlines of the AIDS crisis, Territories brought to life a kind of awkward friendship between a woman with AIDS and the burnt-out nurse in charge of her care. Life pulled her away from the company when she relocated to Europe but happily she returned to the states and now runs the Education & Outreach program for the Colonial Theatre in Keene, NH. To say that Vicky is a cultural force of nature doesn't quite do it justice. The list of groundbreaking cultural programs Vicky has conceived and produced for the community around the theatre is too long to list but let me put it this way. When I brought my storefront experiment, No Place to Hide to the Colonial's storefront picture window and Vicky was producing, every third person walking by was either a fan, a participant or an alum of one of her programs. Each time I visit Keene, I'm struck by the wonderfully symbiotic relationship to this most unusual corner of New Hampshire and this most unexpected lady and all her wild cultural invention.
Here's an audio example of some of the stuff we all made together.
Peace & Love.
