Before I tell you what I learned this week, I just want to say "Wow, what a difference a day makes!" Okay, a couple of days... the last I saw the Ring set was at St. Mary's Lyceum, being loaded in the truck for the trip to the Byham. Today I entered the service entrance of the Byham, navigated the small maze of passageways to backstage and into the house. The magic still quite literally takes my breath away. Because what I saw illuminated and set on stage was the same collection of props and now-costumed singers, but this time it was real! There was an opera being performed!

When we sit in the audience of a theatre, be it for an opera or a play or a musical, we (or at least I) chat with our seatmates, look at the chandeliers, wonder who it was that paid for their name on the armrest, and contemplate the cherubim on the ceiling. But when the house lights go down, the orchestra starts playing, and the curtain goes up something magical happens, something truly magical. We are transported. To another world, to another place, to another time – it matters not which – but verily, transported we are. As a writer, I strive to transport my readers, to show them what I see in my mind's eye, and if I am very lucky I can shape my words to paint the picture I so vividly see. If I am that lucky, you have been transported behind the scenes in the production of this opera, and have shared in my awe.

But in the theatre, unconstrained by mere words, girded with music and propelled by the trio of "lights, curtain, and action!", the magic seems to work that much faster and that much more powerfully. I was transported. And although I was wandering around with camera in hand, talking with stagehands and singers, meandering from backstage to floor to balcony and back again, from that first moment I glimpsed the stage, limned with the colors of the scene and set with selfsame props that I had seen on a gym floor, the magic did its work.

There is a scene in the movie Billy Elliot that defines what I felt. It is at the culmination of the movie, where Billy has grown, and his dreams of becoming a dancer have been realized. His working-class father, who previously had rejected his son's artistic endeavours through a combination of stubbornness, bigotry, and lack of understanding, is sitting in the audience. Because he is in the cheap seats, we don't know if he has secretly bought his own ticket or if his son has sent him one – but there he sits, as the house lights go down. It is a cliched story of aspiration and success against the odds (but a cliche to which Siegfried himself is no stranger), and it is beautifully told. In a poor production, the camera would have lingered on the father's face and tracked the full arc of his emotions as the dancers sprang to the stage. But Billy Elliot was a well-directed and superbly edited movie. We see Billy in the wings just about to command the stage, and the camera flashes onto his father's face for perhaps one second, as his breath catches in his throat and he stares at the stage in wonderment... and in that one fleeting second, we feel the magic. We all know it, we have all felt it ourselves – and we get to watch it enchant and enthrall yet one more of us.

I wasn't watching a collection of singers and canvas-covered props. This was Opera. And my breath caught in my throat, and I stared in wonderment...

But I digress, and I promised I would tell you what I learned this week.

1. Did you ever wonder how actors and stagehands find their props? Probably not, because they are part of the seamless magic of the scene. But when you go backstage, you find that there is a place for everything and everything is in its place – because if it's not, then you have to hunt for it, and with the musical and metronomic precision of entrances and exits, you can't afford the time to look! So as the photo to the right shows, every prop has a well-known and well-labeled place when it isn't being used.
   
   
2. What I saw today was not a "partial dress rehearsal". I apologize, for I misinterpreted what "PDR" meant in the rehearsal schedule. It really means "Piano Dress Rehearsal", where a pianist sits in for the full orchestra.
   
   
3. The Byham theatre has a pit! Over the years I have attended numerous plays, lectures, movies, and concerts in the Byham (as well as singing there a few times), but I never knew that the first few rows Orchestra seats covered a bona fide Orchestra pit. The seats have been spirited away to storage, and the pit awaits the arrival of the orchestra...
   
   
4. Speaking of props, I previously mentioned the "unabashed canvas and wireframe" props. In stagecraft, the trick is making it look real (or real enough for the audience to suspend disbelief) without having it be real. If the set features a set of boulders, someone has to move them! There isn't time to bring in a bulldozer during scene changes, so (as you can see in the picture to the right), the stagehands just muscle the rocks around. Since they're hollow, they are just bulky, but not particularly heavy.

I have to digress one more time, because I re-read what I just wrote. I love words (what writer doesn't?) and I see two very loaded words in my description of my first glimpse of the nearly-completed Ring on stage: "enchant" and "enthrall". In conversation, we tend to use them lightly, but these two words have deep significant meanings, and I suppose that my use of them was not entirely accidental. Since I speak of magic, let's look at "enchant" first. Certainly it means to fill with great delight and charm, but it also means to put under a spell, to ensorcel. It derives from the Middle English inchant, from the French enchante, and from the Latin incantare, where cantare is "to sing". We are put under a spell by the singing, the utterance of the incantations bewitch us, and we find ourselves held spellbound, entranced by the spectacle.

Next comes "enthrall". I confess I first learned the meaning of the word thrall from The Gamesters of Triskelion (episode 46 of the second season of the original "Star Trek", for you non-geeks). And Thrall is also the name of a town in SE Texas. The word "thrall" derives from the Old English thrœl, and (fitting, for this blog), the Old Norse þræll, which means "slave". So we are likewise captivated by the stage, transfixed in our seats, and watch fascinated as the story unfolds.

And if you (as I hope) saw my repeating theme of magic/slave words, then you'll be as fascinated as I was to learn that the Latin root fascinum means "spell" or "witchcraft".

So what's next? I still have a few more tidbits to reveal when I attend the dress rehearsal with the full orchestra, and of course, then there are the performances! Two weeks ago I said that this was going to be fun. I was right.