War Wounds

Often when I play pants roles, I end up with mild injuries. Usually they are bruises on my knees from all the kneeling that inevitably occurs, and sometimes I pull muscles in my neck and back from running around like a teenager. In this production of Lucrezia Borgia, I have incurred some injuries which are completely mysterious to me. I have these two bruises on the back of my thigh, and I have absolutely no idea how they got there. I know they occured during my two dress rehearsals, but I don't know how I got them. I spent the next couple of rehearsals watching the other Orsini to see if any of her positions looked "bruisey" but they didn't. But these are serious bruises, so you'd think I'd remember getting them. However, I have absolutely no idea where they came from - my best guess is either from sitting backwards in a chair and swinging myself around too furiously or from leaning too vigorously against either a spiral staircase or a bed frame. But I still can't pinpoint the actual moment, so I may incur yet another beauty during one of the remaining performances. I think something might be seriously wrong with me that I can bruise like this and not notice.

opening - some thoughts

Last night was my first performance here in Warsaw of Orsini in Lucrezia Borgia - and my first performance ever of this role. It was sort of a strange night. While it was the first performance for me and the soprano, everyone else in the cast was singing their second performance, and second performances always have a different energy than firsts, so this was funny to begin with. The other weird thing was that because of the schedule, my dress rehearsal had been 4 days before and with the other tenor, so I hadn't rehearsed with this tenor in a week, and never with the full set (which made a big difference acoustically in our duet). So, there were factors to be dealt with. And in fact, I dealt with them fine for the most part in the first two acts and everything for me went pretty well.

But then, after the beginning of the second Act, I don't come on again until the beginning of the third act, and with the long intermissions they take here, there was about an hour between when I left and came on again - maybe an hour and a half even. So by the time I got back onstage for the last act, which was my biggest part in the opera, I felt kind of weird. Tired, but nervous, and kind of out of it somehow. I remember standing backstage and feeling really strange and thinking to myself, "I hope I don't have swine flu or something." The duet was fine but it kind of exhausted me, so when I got onstage for the last scene I didn't really feel centered. It's interesting - I really think that roles where you stay onstage for most of the opera are far easier than roles where you have to go away for a long time and come back - I tend to have such a great deal of energy on the stage that when I have to wait a long time in between scenes, it's difficult for me to keep it up. Especially in this situation where I have the first aria of the show, and then the bulk of the rest of my role comes at the end of the opera.

So anyway, when we got to the final scene, I think I was fighting against this lull in energy I was feeling, so I was doing way more physically than I should have, or than I needed to and actually wasting my good energy. By the time we got to my aria, my breathing was quite high and I just didn't feel like I could get centered on anything - on my voice, on my interpretation - it just felt like I was kind of flailing around and circling around the right feeling but not landing on it. Of course, there was plenty of muscle memory, and no one in the audience would have known anything was wrong unless they had seen me sing the aria before, and then maybe they would have heard me do it better. But I still felt annoyed that I couldn't get centered enough to make it what I wanted to. I find that in those situations usually not that many people can tell the difference between your good nights and your bad nights, but it's not as fun to sing and perform when you don't feel in absolute control because then you can't play as much.

It's always a learning process, this job. I know for the next performances that I can't expend so much physical energy in the scene right before my aria, and that I really have to stay focused in the lead up to the aria so I can do everything I want with it. This is probably something I needed to do a performance of the role to learn because my energy is often so different with an audience, and I'm glad I figured it out. When I came out and bowed I got a lot more applause and cheering than I was expecting based on a) how I thought I did and b) the fact that I didn't know a soul in the theater - but I couldn't help but wanting to tell them all to come back because I know it will be better next time. But I guess that's the beauty of live theater - you never know what you're gonna get.

Boo-nanza

I have never participated in a production where there was booing during the curtain call - in fact, I've never even been in the theater to witness booing - until tonight. Tonight was the premiere of Lucrezia Borgia here in Warsaw (I was in the audience as I'm singing the "second premiere" as they call it here) and the show, in my estimate went extremely well. The audience seemed responsive at the end of the first and second acts, and the singers all sang very well. It was my first time seeing the production in it's complete form, and I thought it was very effective and beautiful. All of the singers and the conductor came onto the stage to receive hearty ovations from the public, but when the director entered, there was an eruption of boos coming from all parts of the theater. I was a more than a little shocked to experience this - I mean, it was loud and it was serious - especially after everything seemed to work so well.

This production definitely had a lot of elements added to it that could be considered shocking to some people; it was updated to 1930's fascist Italy, two male characters are played as gay and have a duet which takes place on a bed and involves kissing (even though one of the characters is played by a woman), there is a scene where all the men gather around Lucrezia and simulate urinating on her to punish her for having killed members of their families, and a few other moments that weren't directly in the libretto. But when I watched it tonight as an audience member, I felt that all the dramatic and shocking elements really worked with the libretto, and that it made for a very captivating evening of theater. So I was pretty shocked when the booing started.

After the performance, someone told me that an audience member explained to them that the booing was completely a reaction to the homosexual kissing - that was apparently the only thing that was offensive enough to make people boo. Really? Even when one the people doing the kissing was obviously a woman? Even when the libretto makes it pretty clear that the two guys had something going on? Even in 2009??? But apparently, it was too much for this audience. On the one hand, it's too bad this had to happen because it kind of marred an otherwise very successful premiere, but at the same time, I have to admit that I find it exciting when an audience is passionate enough about the opera to react in a way that is so extreme, even when I don't agree with their opinion.

Jinky

Jinky is short for Jinkooya which means thank you. I remember hearing my friend Georgia use the word Jinky when she came back from Poland the first time and thinking that it was a word she made up, but in fact, it's real. When I heard someone use it for the first time I thought, "wait - that's Georgia's pretend word!!"

I haven't been very good at keeping up with my "two new polish words a day" rule. The first week, the tenor and I promised that as a team we would learn two polish words a day and practice them on each other, but he left for all of last week to go sing a concert elsewhere and without the buddy system, I completely gave up. Plus, I ended up spending so much time speaking italian last week that I kept trying to speak italian to the polish people and wondering why they didn't understand me. It's funny how your brain works that way - it thinks: foreign country, foreign language, and for a split second you forget you can't communicate in this country in this language. I will have these moments where I will be about to walk up to a counter of some kind with the idea in my head that I'm going to be able to ask for something, only to realize at the last moment that the sentence I was just absentmindedly constructing in my head was in italian, and polish people don't speak italian. But almost everyone under 35 in poland seems to speak english, so I'm usually okay.

This weekend we had 4 days free and I wondered what the hell I was gonna do with that many free days. Luckily, the day before all the days off I struck up a conversation with one of the assistant directors who happens to be italian, and discovered that he would also be here all weekend with not much to do. So he and I ended up spending about 8 hours a day together walking around warsaw (even though ALL THE STORES were closed from saturday at 4PM until this morning!!! ARUGH!!!!) and chatting in about 70% italian and 30% english. It's really easy to spend a lot of time with someone who is about as good as you are in their language in your language because both of you get to practice the other language, but when you get tired of thinking too hard you can just switch to your own language. Plus it comes in really handy sometimes to be able to communicate in more than one language - usually if we speak english other people in poland can understand us so it's better to speak italian, but one night we had dinner in this sort of touristy restaurant where for some reason there were tons of italian tourists, so we switched to english so we could talk about private stuff and not be understood. Every time I speak italian however, I am reminded of far I need to go before I can really just blab away and understand absolutely everything, and it makes me long for the day when I will again get paid to spend months at a time in Italy.

Having a lot of time off, whether it be between rehearsals, performances, or entire gigs, makes me remember how much I really love the part of this job that is rehearsing. I really enjoy rehearsing so much! It makes me so happy to make music and drama and work and change things in a pressure-less environment, and to be around other people and laugh and make jokes and make music. It sounds so cheesy but I really do enjoy both the creative parts and the collaborative parts so much, that when I have too many days off I miss rehearsing terribly. Luckily today we got back at it, the full cast has now arrived, and we're off and running. And all I will tell you about this production for now is that there is some public urination that happens, and I am involved in it. I don't want to give away any director secrets, so if you want to know more you'll just have to come to warsaw and check it out (don't worry, I'll give you the full details after the show opens. Maybe I'll even get a photo!!) JINKY!

Warsaw continues

Yes, I've been really bad about writing blog entries. But here's a run down of the last week or so.

We finished our week of what I felt were quite successful and fulfilling musical rehearsals, I had a day free, and then I had to travel out of town for an audition in another country. I'll write more about that at a later time if anything pans out from it. I came back tuesday evening to begin staging rehearsals on wednesday morning. Except that because of various scheduling issues with cast / staff, they had in fact already staged a great deal of the opera about two weeks before I arrived with many of the principals, so my job was to watch what had been done and then jump up and do it myself. It can be kind of challenging to jump into a staging rehearsal without first "walking and talking it" or without watching it several times, especially with a new role, but I was so eager to get on my feet and start running around like a boy, that I didn't mind. The very first thing we worked on was the duet between my character and the tenor, which is a gay love duet in this production, so I immediately had to practice making loving gestures that were masculine. It's not easy because we're kind of spooning at one point, and my tendency is to get all girly, but I have to work at keeping myself butch. The director gave me some good advice, which was to be more solid when I grab a body part instead of all "caressy" and it helped. Then, in the next two days, we did all of the parts of the opera that I'm in, so now I know what all my staging looks like. I also got a look at the drawings of the sets, which look incredibly cool, and was excited to come across this advertisement on the side of a building when I was walking back from a lunch with some colleagues:


I am really enjoying Warsaw as a City quite a lot. It's not so big, so I can really walk the whole thing (at least the main parts) it is very clean and easy to navigate (except crossing the street which I haven't exactly figured out the rules for yet). The young people are very stylish and well dressed, and I like watching them walk down the street from sidewalk cafes, where I've been able to sit often since the weather has been ridiculously nice. The other night some polish colleagues took me to eat real polish food because I'd been really wanting to eat a good pierogi, and when they asked me if I had ever tried fat on bread, I thought they were getting confused with language. But as it turns out, "fat" that you spread on bread is a real thing, and it's delicious. I guess it's some kind of rendered animal fat, but before you gag, listen to me when I tell you it tastes like the best butter you ever ate. I have no idea what's in it exactly or how it is created, but it tastes like, well, if you took bacon and melted in down into a creamy spread. This is what it looks like (it's on the left - the other spread is a kind of yogurty chive thing - also delicious)


Because of the easter weekend, we now have 4 DAYS completely free. Normally I would be happy with the free time, but since pretty much everyone is leaving to go home, the thought of having no human contact for that long is daunting. I'm okay spending a day or two on my own, but by about day 3 I start to feel like a crazy person. In fact, I was just reading this article in the New Yorker about how prisoners in solitary confinement almost always go completely crazy, so I'm not the only one who doesn't get into the whole being alone thing. But I will survive and try to explore the parts of Warsaw I haven't seen, and maybe even make a trip to Krakow, which is supposed to be an amazing city. Or maybe I'll just sit in my hotel room all weekend and watch movies and eat fat on bread. Both possibilities have their charms.

and then

I haven't felt as compelled to blog here in Warsaw as I thought I would. First of all because nothing particularly hilarious has happened to me after the first day I was here. I don't know whether I am just more accustomed to being in a foreign country so I'm not making as many dumb mistakes as I have in previous trips, or whether it's something about Warsaw that doesn't seem as "foreign" as other places. One of my polish colleagues told me that Poles definitely like "american stuffs" so maybe it's easy for me to get around because of that. Also, I now have 6 words of Polish in my vocabulary, which isn't enough to even try to communicate past the most basic requirements, so I'm not suggesting that "there are too many condoms in the food" the way I did once in an error filled conversation in italian. Regardless, I'm enjoying myself, and enjoying this opera immensely. The singers are all excellent and we've had the luxury of having a week of purely musical rehearsals, which really gives you the opportunity to figure out what you're doing vocally before throwing in all that running around. I've been trying to avoid spending my entire fee just on eating out, but it gets difficult when you're in a hotel room with no kitchen for a month. Some of my tricks have included taking as much fruit as I can carry from the free breakfast in the hotel and eating it for lunch, and buying pre-made sandwiches from a place called coffee heaven that was highly recommended to me by my friend Georgia who has worked in Warsaw often. I've already had quite a bit of time to explore the main parts of the city, and the weather has actually been gorgeous and springy. I've learned that the signs for the bathrooms here are an upside down triangle for the men's room and a circle for the ladies room, so I haven't had any more accidental encounters with in-use urinals. I've only gotten lost in the theater about 3 or 4 times since the first day, but I've always been able to find my way back to wherever my rehearsal was, and I was even able to show one of the polish singers where the bathrooms were on the floor where we were rehearsing that she didn't know about! Maybe I'm actually getting used to this traveling to foreign countries and singing thing.

Day One: at the Teatr

I woke up early this morning for my 10 AM rehearsal at the theater. I decided that since I had no idea where the theater was located, I had better take a taxi, and thought the hotel taxis would be the safest bet. Everyone had told me that it was basically a straight shot from the hotel to the theater, so I was confused about why the taxi driver seemed to be going on a bunch of different side streets. I discovered later that ride shouldn't have cost me more than 10 Zloti, and since he charged me 35, I figured out that I got the "scenic route" reserved for tourists who can't argue in Polish. Nice.

When I arrived at the theater I discovered that there were about 56 different entrances, so I picked the first one called door number 1. Sounded promising. I walked up to the desk and tried speaking to them in english and explaining that I was a singer and had rehearsal. They just stared at me blankly until I said "I'm a singer. Aaaaaahhhh!." Yes, I sang a note. But it worked, they got somebody to come get me and someone from the company who speaks english met me and walked me to the rehearsal room. It was incredibly complicated - we had to take an elevator to the 5th floor, walk through a maze of random corridors which finally led us to a staircase, which led us to the rehearsal room. We rehearsed some music, and the sweet stage manager explained that I needed to go for costumes. I cannot pronounce his name which is something like Alzcnfh.

He brought me to another floor through a bunch more dark hallways to the costume shop, told them who I was, and bid me adieu. They began measuring me, and when they were finished, they explained to me via hand motions (there was no one who spoke any english) that they needed to know my height. They wrote down the number 168, which lead me to realize they wanted to know my height in meters. It's probably something I should know, but being from the only country that shuns the metric system, I had no idea. I wrote down on the same paper 5'9" which they just looked at blankly and pointed to the 168. I was saying "Yeah, we don't have that in America - we use feet and inches.." but they did NOT understand me. Eventually, somebody just motioned for me to get up near a wall, and they measured me from head to foot. It turns out I'm 173 (is that centimeters? I don't even know what the unit of measurement actually is) and the head lady led me to another room where they measured my head, and then another room where they measured my foot. After the measuring was done, the shoe man cheerfully said "Jinkooya" which means thank you, and that was my cue that I was dismissed.

Except I had absolutely no idea where I was in the theater, how to get out, or how to get back to rehearsal. I decided to try retracing my steps, and I was sort of just wandering around the hallways looking lost. I passed a woman at some point who could see I was lost, so she said (I assume) something in polish like what are you looking for? I knew my rehearsal was on the 6th floor, so I said 6, held up 6 fingers and pointed upwards saying "I need to get up one floor." She looked at me quizzically, and I kid you not, she sort of did that thing where you kind of push the air forward with two hands when you want to communicate "you're crazy!" and she walked away from me. I thought - hmm - maybe there is no 6th floor and I'm just confused, but eventually by trial and error, I found my way back up there.

On the way however, I decided to try to find a restroom (why am I so often lost in theaters looking for a bathroom?) and found two little bathrooms I had passed before. They were both little rooms with separate little rooms with toilets in them. One was occupied, so I delicately opened the door to the other one, and lucky I did it delicately because there was a man peeing at a urinal in the one I opened. I'm telling you, the door was slightly ajar and there were no words on the door, so unless I'm missing something, it's not really my fault I walked in on him. But I jumped out quickly and ran the other way. I suddenly didn't need to pee at all.

The rehearsals went well, the other singers (mostly all polish) are all great and really well prepared and exited about making music and talking about characters. OH - and I found out that in this production, my character and the tenor are lovers, which is exciting for me since I'm playing a man! I've been a woman in love with men and a man in love with women, but I've never been a man in love with another man! It totally makes sense with the libretto and with the original Hugo play, and it gives me a whole set of new things to think about. Am I the alpha male in this relationship or is he? I think it will be awesome if we're both really butch but we have a big kiss or something. It will be shocking to opera audiences maybe, but hey, in our duet we're singing about how we're united til death, and how we're two flowers on the same stem (direct translation), so it really shouldn't be too shocking that we're like, so totally into each other. Actually I'm totally into him, but he's kind of obsessed with his mother, and his father is also his grandfather. Yeah, solve that riddle. And if you do, can you also tell me which is the men's room and which is the women's room in the Teatr Wielki?

Warsawa

I woke up yesterday morning and I almost tried to change my ticket to come later. I have been battling with this cold/ sinus infection for a couple of weeks now, and I thought it was gone, and then suddenly it came back. And I thought I was getting better, but I woke up Sunday morning and was so congested that I thought I couldn't possibly get on an airplane. But after taking enough sudafed and afrin to fill a medicine chest, I was feeling like I could manage. I also started a course of antibiotics, which makes you feel awful and sleepy, but is a necessary evil sometimes. And so I was off.

When I got to JFK I was so excited - people always ask me "Are you excited about your trip?" and I never am, until I arrive at the airport. Then the possibilities of all the adventures I'm about to have suddenly seem very real and I get a surge of adrenaline. The flight was probably about 90 % Polish people, and they were a lively bunch. Everybody was moving around, chatting with their neighbors, roaming the aisles. Everybody broke out into applause when we landed even though it wasn't a particularly turbulent flight or anything - must be a Polish tradition that I don't know about.

When I exited the plane, I just couldn't quite believe I was in Warsaw. I mean, yesterday I was having soup at the Metro Diner and now I'm in Poland. I guess I'm used to traveling and it doesn't phase me to come to a foreign city and figure stuff out, but I often get struck with amazement that it's actually happening and that this is my life. Then some babushka practically knocks me over trying to get her luggage off the conveyer belt and I'm jolted back into reality.

As I rode in the taxi to the hotel, I was thinking about how when I was in Italy, I always felt a little pressure and nerves about communicating in italian, although I loved doing it. But being in Poland, I simply know that I cannot communicate and I don't even try. It's liberating and disappointing all at once. I would certainly prefer to be able to communicate, although knowing I can't even say hello keeps me from having to make decisions about whether or not to engage in conversations with people. You should have seen me in the grocery store trying to explain to the woman that I wanted still water, not sparkling. I saw that the word "gazowana" was on a lot of the bottles so I was saying "nyet gazowana" although I think that might be Russian and not Polish. It worked though, my water is bubble free. I was unsuccessful in trying to locate a pre-paid sim card, but maybe tomorrow near the theater I'll have more luck. Now all I have to do is find the theater for my 10 AM (that'll be 4 AM for me) rehearsal tomorrow, and hopefully sleep a lot between now and then.

Alice in wonderland

Today was my dress rehearsal for tomorrow's concert with ASO in Avery Fisher Hall. I have performed once before in Avery Fisher, but I didn't really get the lay of the land during that concert for some reason, and today I got really lost. I knew how to get from the stage door to the stage itself, but I arrived rather early and wanted to go sit in the house and watch some of the rehearsal. The orchestra was completely filling up the entire stage, so I asked the stage manager if there was a way I could get to the house from backstage, and she told me that if I went up one flight of stairs, I would be able to enter a box and then could come down to the orchestra level through the lobby.

I figured that part out okay, and was sitting in the audience enjoying the rehearsal when I realized I had drunk a ton of water today and that I really had to find the bathroom. I tried going out in the lobby to use the restroom out there, but the doors to the outside lobby where the bathrooms are were locked, so if I went out there I wouldn't be able to get back in. I figured I could find some restrooms backstage, so I went back up to the level in the lobby to go through the box into the backstage, and I I swear to you, the door was no longer there. That's when I started to feel like Alice in Wonderland - I was standing in the box staring at the wall where there should have been a door, and I was totally dumbfounded. I went back outside the box to see if it was somewhere else, but there was no connection to the backstage. I went into the lobby on that level and saw that there were some restrooms I could access but they were locked too. I was seriously scratching my head.

I went back down and sat in the orchestra section again, but my bladder was really starting to be angry with me, so after fidgeting in my seat for a minute, I decided to try again. I went back up one flight and looked around for more doors, and when I couldn't find any, I decided to try going up one more flight just to see what happened. Well guess what? That's where the magic door was. I just didn't remember how many flights I had come down to enter the orchestra section. What a blonde! When I got through the magic door, I was backstage on the level above the stage where all the dressing rooms are. I figured there must be a public restroom somewhere on the floor so I walked to and fro several times but couldn't find any such thing. There was one dressing room that looked really fancy - like maybe the star or the conductor dressing room - and the door was wide open and I could see that there was a bathroom in there. I didn't want to go in there though, because I just imagined coming out of the bathroom with the sound of the toilet flushing behind me just as the conductor was trying to come in and have his quiet time during the break. I walked around a little more and couldn't find anything, and the situation was becoming more desperate. I checked the monitor to see that they were still rehearsing on stage, and I figured even if they finished I could make it in and out of there before anyone made it upstairs. 30 seconds later, I was quickly exiting and glancing from side to side to make sure no one had seen me.

I went down one flight to the stage level and found the orchestra administrator who is in charge of wrangling me. I made some silly joke to him about how I was getting lost in the building looking for the restrooms, and he said "Oh, no one has taken you to your dressing room yet?" "Nope," I replied. So he had me follow him. We walked up the stairs and down the hall, and he motioned around the corner. It was the dressing room where I had just used the bathroom in such a hurry and made sure no one saw me. I had been sneaking into my own dressing room. I'm pretty sure these sort of things only happen to me.

thwarted by a cold

I had such big plans for this week. In addition to the concert on Sunday with ASO of the Varese pieces, I really wanted to get a lot of work done on memorizing Lucrezia Borgia and getting the sucker into my voice. It lies low and heavy and is a great opportunity for me to liberally throw around my chest voice - something I rarely do in Mozart or even Rossini. The only problem is that the low heavy tessitura of the Donizetti lies in complete opposition to the high floaty tessitura of the Varese pieces, and I don't think it would be a good idea to practice all that heavy singing every day and then expect myself to float high b flats on Sunday afternoon (and at the rehearsals before). Add to this the fact that I woke up yesterday with a sore throat and am just waiting to see if this little illness turns into a full blown cold / upper respiratory infection or wanders away without making my life a living hell. So now I have to figure out how to learn this score just by looking at it.

Every singer has different methods of learning and memorizing music. I worked with someone recently who can just look at a score for several days without singing a note, and have it memorized before they even make a peep. I hate that person. I have no such photographic memory skills, although I am a pretty quick learner. Usually I teach myself the notes as fast as possible (the old fashioned way - by playing them on the piano and singing them lightly until my muscles/brain remember the order of the intervals). I like to get with a coach and sing it with them because I can memorize the music really quickly if I record my coachings and listen to them a few times. It's funny, I can't just listen to a recording of someone else singing my role and memorize it quickly, but something about listening to myself sing it gets it into my brain rather speedily. I'm sure there's some scientific brain study in the making about why that is - paging Oliver Sachs (he writes a lot about music and the brain). I was supposed to have a coaching on Lucrezia today to run through all of it and get it onto my ipod so I could listen to it a few times and not have to belt it out all week, but still get the whole thing in my memory. But I had to cancel the coaching because I didn't want to risk singing for an hour on a sore throat and getting laryngitis or something (which happened to me recently). So I just have to sit here and look at the score like my photographic memory friend and try to keep my brain from wandering and thinking about what I'm going to make for dinner later. Maybe I DO have a photographic memory, but it's just plagued with a lot of ADD. Yep, that's my excuse. Hmmm - what AM I gonna make for dinner? NO NO: Donizetti Donizetti DONIZETTI .....Spaghetti, linguini, rigatoni..? Ack. Never study when you're hungry.