If any of you now have, or have had small children, you may at some time have told them to use their "inside voice". Being in direct opposition to their heedlessly screaming "outside voices", we hope that the image of their "inside voices" is one of genteel charm, or at least enough contiguous stillness that the cat will not spontaneously shed half of its fur in panic, and the crockery will not shatter. We hope. I don't have any small children myself – I simply rent them from my friends when my cat's fur gets too thick.

But what does it mean for an opera singer to use their inside voice? It's an interesting question to ponder, so try this...

Find the largest unobstructed space in your house. For me, it is a span about 40 feet long, starting in my kitchen, through the open door to my dining room, and continuing on into my living room. Depending on whether you live in Oakland or Fox Chapel, your mileage may vary. Now imagine carrying on a conversation across that distance. Then pretend, if you will, that someone has turned on the stereo. Add to that a dozen other people talking, and a chef banging pots and pans in the kitchen.

Are you screaming at the top of your lungs yet? Not if you are a powerfully-voiced singer – you're just warming up!

The distance from center stage at the Benedum Center to the end of the back row of Second Tier is over 230 feet (Pittsburgh Opera's Technical Director Clint Bennett actually measured it for me :-). When I saw Greer Grimsley singing the role of Baron Scarpia in Tosca in April, I was "merely" in Row N in the center of the Second Tier. That meant that I was about 50 feet closer than W69 and W70 (the farthest seats at the back corners left and right of the house). Greer was somewhat larger than an ant from where I sat, but even in the rarified atmosphere of the nosebleed seats, he was clearly heard.

When he was singing at the close of Act I, he was about 6 times farther away than the maximum distance you can get in my house. But the stereo wasn't on – there was a 55 piece orchestra playing fortissimo (and the percussionists were beating louder than any chef I have ever heard). There weren't a dozen people talking, there was a full operatic chorus singing (again, fortissimo). And yet even in the back row, when he sang "Tosca, you make me forget God!", you could hear every word and every note (although the OpTrans supertitles did help me with the Italian). Oh yes, one more thing: the singers are not mic'ed. There is no amplification (just good acoustics), and what you hear is what they give.

But think about it... he was farther away than Ben Roethlisberger has ever thrown a football. He was more than 80 yards away, and you could hear him over a full orchestra and a full chorus going at full blast. And in spite of the sonic competition he still brought shivers to my spine.

So next time you are tempted to tell those kids to "use your inside voice", you might instead point out to them that compared to an opera singer, they are a bunch of wimps, amateurs, and lightweights. It won't shut them up, but it might make you feel better.

I couldn't resist – I had to write one more post about the Ring. The title comes from the famous observation about the end of Wagner's often-arduous Ring Cycle (frequently taking 18 hours to perform in its entirety). Opera Theatre of Pittsburgh performed it in "merely" 10 hours (though not through speed-singing, but through judicious elision of recitative), yet even that amount of singing was a sufficient effort that the part of Brünnhilde was played tag-team. With classical big-boned Wagnerian sopranos carrying more than their fair share of heft, the immolation scene at the close of Götterdämmerung is the final opportunity for these larger-than-life ladies to sing their Teutonic hearts out, and more than one dazed operagoer has noted the veracity of the statement "it ain't over 'till the fat lady sings". So how delightful then, for us to be treated not to the stereotypical heavy horned-helmet headed heroines (try saying that three times fast), but rather a sprightly pair of svelte sopranos singing the rôle of Brünnhilde.

I have to agree with Mark Kanny's review. The Brünnhilde in The Valkyrie was fierce and emotional. I felt her thrill of battle and equally her pain and later joy with Wotan. Likewise the Brünnhilde in Twilight of the Gods was powerfully human in her love, betrayal, and redemption. It was so much more than I had expected it to be. How wonderful then, to also put the old "fat lady sings" adage to lie!

But fat or thin, helmetted or bewigged, Brünnhilde sings on the pyre in the immolation scene. Valhalla is in ruins, The Rhinemaidens have their ring, and Yggdrasil has been chopped up, yet what of Wotan? Brünnhilde was made mortal and (one would think) died, yet Wotan is still a god. Can the immortal gods die? It seems to be a rather paradoxical concept, so...

After Wagner, Whither Wotan?

Myths and legends are good at battles, ascendancies and deaths, but the sought after clarity of the denouements seem to be lacking. In the ancient Greek world, when you died you didn’t go to heaven or hell. If you were mortal, whether you were good or bad you died and went to the Underworld. There you became a shade, and lost your voice forever. Not much to look forward to, especially if you were a Hector, an Achilles, or a Socrates! Even mighty Herakles (who is granted apotheosis after he immolates himself) is never heard from again, in spite of living with the gods themselves.

Comic books (or as I insisted before, "Graphic Novels") are equally wishy-washy about endings. Unless a character is killed fatally dead-to-death with no saving-throw, they usually manage to re-appear in a later episode, minus some memory or some power, and more often than not, minus a lot of believability.

So with the destruction of the old order (and in spite of promises, the new order is no better), what's an immortal to do? The trouble with being a god is that you've got no one to pray to...

In Small Gods, Terry Pratchett (from whom I also purloined the last line of the previous paragraph), postulated that gods need worshippers to live. The more worshippers a god has, the more powerful it is. Conversely, a god with no worshippers is a pitiable thing – small, unnoticed (yet still immortal), an unworshipped god eventually diminishes into nothingness, a gnat buzzing away in the subconscious minds of men, ever more strident yet less and less heard. So it was, perhaps, that Wagner envisioned the mighty gods of Valhalla after the promised new order arose. I am an insufficient scholar to know for sure – I just read fun books.

Neil Gaiman also postulates that a god's power decreases with a decline in followers. In American Gods, though, he goes one step further. Much as Willie Sutton robbed banks because "that's where the money is", so the old gods travel to the New World, because that's where the faithful are. Worshippers have declined in the Norse countries, so Wotan comes to America, where the old ways still survive (if perhaps in a closeted form), and the young are more impressionable, and more likely to follow a grizzled old one-eyed man with a penchant for ravens.

According to some, even the motto of Kaiser Wilhelm II is related to Wotan. Gott Mit Uns (God [is] with us) got a bad reputation in WW-II as the slogan of the Wehrmacht, but it was used in WW-I, and before that is found on 19th century Prussian coins, 17th century Swedish medals, 14th and 15th century battle cries, and so on back into time...

Up to now I have been quoting fiction and speculation, but I have one more factual tidbit for you. I waited until Wednesday to post this last article for a reason. The word Wednesday derives from the Old English Wodnes dæg (Woden's Day), and thence from the Old Norse Óðinsdagr. It doesn't matter what you call him – Óðinn, Odin, Woden, Wotan, or his other dozens of names. He's not pining for the fjords and he isn't pushing up daisies. He's not even resting. He's here.

Strange visitor from another profession, you know me as a mild-mannered blogger for the Every Other Daily Planet. Because I was scheduled to teach a class at Stanford University (surprise, I am a computer geek by profession), I managed to miss all of the dress rehearsals of the Ring. But I did get to see The Valkyrie yesterday afternoon, and will see Twighlight of the Gods today. For me, every opera I see is a new experience. Hearing the Valkyries sing "Hojotoho!" was pretty cool (especially after seeing Apocalypse Now). And since I haven't seen much opera (each one being fun and wonderful for different reasons), I will not play at being an opera critic and comment on the performance. Besides, Green Cryptography might rob me of my blogger powers. Yet as all the bad puns and allusions may have hinted, I have an insight about the stories we love.

In The Valkyrie, I watched the arc of Wotan's emotions as they roughly followed this path:

1. Bwahh hah hah!
2. Nyah, nyah, Fricka!
3. Drat, Fricka! (Hey Brünnhilde: Do what I mean, not what I say...)
4. Raaar! (Hey Brünnhilde: You were supposed to do what I said, not what I meant!)
5. Fear my wrath, you are so busted!
6. Ummmm... Okay, Brünnhilde, I still gotta punish you, but I'll show you how much I love you, too (and prepare for the Next Episode)

Now, computer geeks are stereotyped (at some points in their lives) as playing Dungeons and Dragons, reading Comic Books, and being otherwise a bit odd. Guilty, guilty, and guilty. I haven't played D&D with my friends since their kids were born, but I still regularly read comix (although we prefer to call them Graphic Novels), and if you think this is an art form for kids, then I strongly encourage you to read Scott McCloud's scholarly (and graphical) Understanding Comics. Sorry, the "a bit odd" part is genetically imprinted – just ask my somewhat more normal girlfriend. But with my trio of character attributes, I noticed a remarkable similarity of Wagner's Wotan to the aforementioned Comic Books.

Some of the characters in the Marvel universe bear a striking similarity to Wotan. One such character is Wolverine, from the recently cinematographied X-Men series. He is far from alone in his emotional gyre, but he too cycles from Raaar! to Brooding but Nice and back again with astounding regularity. We see the same cycles in Kung Fu movies (even in the high art versions like Jet Li's Hero). Greed, guilt, shame, and wrath feature prominantly as points on the emotional compass, but surprisingly love is often present, too (and amazingly, in combination with all of the other emotions).

Why was Wagner so popular in the 1880's to 1920's? Why are Spiderman, Batman, Superman, and the X-Men so popular today? The stories of Greek and Norse mythology and Troy? Why Kung Fu movies? Why Macbeth? Why Rocky? Highbrow or lowbrow, these stories all share something in common: larger-than-life heros and villians, meteoric rises and stellar falls (never mind that meteors fall to earth and stars rise ascendant). We aspire to our hero's graces, we identify with his (or her) good characteristics, and we (re-)learn the lesson of hubris.

I find it interesting that we yearn for the abject lessons we also shun. Who wants a friend to say "I told you so"? Who wants a parent to teach them a lesson? Yet we crave stories that demonstrate the avoidable (yet obvious) falls from heights, because we instinctively know that we would never make those mistakes (or perhaps we know that we would, and in watching we needn't suffer them ourselves). We crave stories of redemption and reconciliation because they show our own greater good (or at least the good for which we all aspire) and make us feel better that someone can ultimately get it right. And perhaps we crave the "Raaar!" of our larger-than-life heros to make up for the societal shackles we put on our own emotions, but we also need the remorseful Nice Guy to balance it all out. Or maybe we all just like a good yarn, a story to ruminate on, an escape from whatever our mundane day-to-day may be.

I hope that in documenting the rehearsals and preparations for the Ring, I have given my readers a good yarn or two, and given you all a thing or two to ruminate on. Thank you for giving me the opportunity to do so (and escape from my mundane day-to-day), because believe me, it has been a lot of fun. And stay tuned for the Next Episode, because Pagliacci is coming, and you won't believe some of the odd associations I've made there.

Raaar!

Poet Laureate Maya Angelou wrote a far better poem than my eponymous title, but I wanted to revisit flying things. I also thought I might borrow fame and evoke a punny smile – please let me know if I succeeded...

In a previous post, I asked what a dragon was, and how would be the best way represent it, given the constraints of budget and stage size. In this post I want to discuss another flying (but non-firebreathing) creature – the woodbird from Siegfreid. In this opera, Siegfried is at first confounded by his inability to communicate with the woodbird, and then after tasting the dragon's blood, finds himself able to speak directly with it. So, if you were staging Siegfried, how would you create the character of the bird?

Let me tell you of a few ways that I came up with:

1. We could obviously dress the soprano in a bird suit, replete with feathers.
   
   
2. The soprano could sing upstage, with a downstage mechanical bird being controlled from the wings (either flying by wires, or run on a track).
   
   
3. The bird could be a puppet, controlled onstage by a black-clad puppeteer (with the black outfit our cue that we shouldn’t see him or her).
   
   
4. The bird itself could be played another non-singing actor (or perhaps even a dancer), so that the bird’s movements could be very free, leaving the soprano to concentrate only on her singing.
   
   
5. The bird could be more abstract, such as a bird-shaped spotlight, accompanying the soprano (or even a point of light on a wire, similar to Tinkerbell in the Mary Martin/Cyril Ritchard version of Peter Pan).
   
   
6. The bird could be an appendage attached to the soprano (imagine a 4-to-6 foot flexible staff connected to the back of the singer's costume, with a bird on the end of it, hanging in front of her).
   
   
7. The bird could be a prop on a staff held by the soprano, much like a scepter or mace of office.
   

I am certain that the creative amongst you can think of a few ways that I missed, but I will spoil it for you and tell you that it is the last of my alternatives that was chosen by Opera Theatre of Pittsburgh.

But now comes one of those interesting turns of fate, where an actor is presented with an opportunity to use a skill learned long ago. So long ago, in fact, that perhaps she never thought she’d use it again…

It turns out that our soprano learned to twirl a baton as a child. She was never a cheerleader or anything like that. But now the woodbird – perhaps originally imagined as a “bird on a stick” – really flies! Don’t laugh (okay, you can smile), but really! It works! Just like the 5-piece Dragon McNuggets, the bird-on-a-stick flown by the soprano herself is utterly convincing. It is yet one more fascinating artistic choice that this company has used to tell Wagner’s epic tale.

Tonight was the All Star Game, an event as alien to most opera goers as a production of Wagner is to most baseball fans. It was also time for dress rehearsal, but I’ll get to that (and the game) in a little bit. Today was also a lighting day, and that means a marathon run-through of all the lighting cues in the operas. The singers and the orchestra don’t need to be present until the dress rehearsal, but the artistic directors and stage manager get to walk through each and every cue to make sure that the instruments are properly set. It is a thankless and time-consuming task, but it must be done. Supernumeraries are called upon to stand on the spots where the singers will be, and position, intensity, and color are all checked to ensure that once the singers mount the stage, they are properly lit.

I find the use of the word “instrument” interesting. The light is called an instrument, and the device used to measure the light’s color and intensity is also called an instrument. The members of the orchestra all play instruments, and the singers refer to their voices as their instruments. Actor’s and dancer’s bodies are their instruments. And the audience uses financial instruments to purchase admission to a performance. I wonder why we don’t just call them "thingies", or "doohickeys", or some other universally acceptable mumble-word. Why “instrument”? At least the conductor wields a baton... But I digress.

Because there is no orchestra, no singers, and really not much of anything going on, I was able to get some interesting pictures. I’d like to share them with you, and that is the real reason for this entry. These are views that you’ll never see as an audience member, but which are familiar to cast and crew.

The first picture above is the view of the stage from the back of the house. You can see the directors and their computer screens, preparing the check the lighting cues at the start of the next scene. As with all the pictures in this blog, click on them to get a larger view.

Following this is a view from the front of the stage. You can see the orchestra pit below, and during the performance, the conductor would be standing on the podium in the center. Of course, during a performance, the singers wouldn’t see a view that is anything like this. They would see the conductor, but everything else would be black against the glare of the lights on stage and the spotlights that you can see lining the balcony. When you perform on stage, usually the only way you know that there is an audience in the house is when they applaud. You can’t see a thing beyond the proscenium except perhaps the exit lights and the lamps illuminating the aisles and stairs. Singers and actors who make eye contact with the audience are good at imagining an audience.

The next photograph is from fully upstage. This is where you get to see the mechanics behind the magic. No one but the actors and crew ever see the back side of the props and sets, so they don’t need to be particularly fancy – they just need to be practical and structurally sound, so as unimaginative as cross-braces may be, they are there for a reason. They allow the imaginative parts of the set to remain upright, so that the audience can fall headlong into the story on stage (instead of the props on stage falling headlong into the audience).

The next photograph is the stage as seen from the pit. This is close to the view that the conductor will see (his place is a bit to the right of where I shot this picture). However, in general it is only the conductor who will see this view, because every member of the orchestra is watching him, and not the stage. The photograph after that is what the orchestra members will see – the other musicians, the conductor on his illuminated podium, and behind all of that, the darkened house with its unseen but sometimes heard audience.

But I also learned a disturbing fact today. I discovered that singers and crew must suffer for their craft. It is not the long hours, but it is rather privation of which I speak. And not the personal suffering we saw in the garrets and unheated tenements in Rent or Moulin Rouge, but privation within the very theatre in which the company is to perform!

Perhaps you were wondering how I’d get back to the ball game, so here it is at last. It seems that the All Star teams are being fêted in the Byham’s lobby this afternoon and evening, and amidst much pomp and circumstance are to be driven in their limos the two or three blocks to the stadium, with the assembled faithful watching the parade. It strikes me as odd that President Clinton walked a number of blocks in the January chill to his inauguration, and that Queen Elizabeth braves London weather and crowds in an open coach, yet these athletes need an air-conditioned limousine to transit a trivial distance to what purports to be an All Star athletic competition!

But because the events seems to demand it, here the millionaire ball players are being given a free lunch in the Byham lobby (as if being chosen to play wasn’t honor enough for them to pay for their own meal). And as a consequence, the entire cast and crew of the Ring are barred from the lobby of their own theatre.

Call me an idealist, but wouldn’t it have been nicer if the ball players were banned from the stadium while singers and musicians got to practice in the open air? Click on the "Comments" link below and let me know what you think.

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.

In this post, I want to ask you two questions:

First of all, what is a dragon? Wikipedia says that it is theorized that western dragons have descended from Roman dragons. Roman dragons evolved from serpentine Greek ones, combined with the dragons of Persia, in the mix that characterized the hybrid Greek/Eastern Hellenistic culture. From Babylon, the "Dragon of Marduk" in molded glazed terracotta bricks that was part of the 6th century Gate of Ishtar has come to rest at The Detroit Institute of Arts. Dragons are found in Celtic, Norse, Catalan, Italian, Germanic, and Slavic mythology. Their pervasiveness (like flood stories) in both the East and the West tell me that their origins are very old. I am certain that Joseph Campell has a lot to say on this.

Modern films and paintings give us a newer view of dragons, colored by generations of imaginations. In the movie Dragonslayer, the dragon (a right nasty beastie named Vermithrax Pejorative, which means "the Worm from Thrace which makes things worse") flies and breathes fire. This theme repeats in Reign of Fire and a host of other movies. In Dragonheart, the dragon is wise and good, but happens to fly and can still breathe fire. St. George slew an evil dragon (often portrayed with wings, but fire is in question). Sometimes the dragons hoard gold, sometimes they snack on virgins. In contrast, the Chinese proudly proclaim themselves "Lung Tik Chuan Ren" (Descendents of the Dragon), and Chinese Dragon (or Lung) symbolizes power and excellence, valiancy and boldness, heroism and perseverance, nobility and divinity.

No such luck for Siegfried! The Wagnerian dragon has a deadly stinger on his tail and poisonous (or flaming) breath. Dispatching this beast will require strength and ambition – fortunately, Siegfried has more than enough of both.

Okay, now that we think we know what a dragon is, how can we portray it on stage? In Sing Faster, a Stagehand's Ring Cycle, the dragon of the San Francisco Opera is a mechanical behemoth with teams of stagehands animating the body and tail, and is so large that one stagehand is seated inside the head moving it's mouth and eyes. At the Sydney opera, the dragon's palm is large enough to hold the body of Mime, and in other productions (for example Pittsburgh Opera's arch rival, the Seattle Opera) the dragon has breathed real fire. So perhaps more to the point, given that the Opera Theatre of Pittsburgh is performing not in these esteemed houses, nor in the Metropolitan Opera House nor the Royal Covent Garden, nor even in Pittsburgh's lavish Benedum Center where Pittsburgh Opera plays, but is instead a smaller budget production in the exquisite Byham Theatre – how can we portray a dragon with the majesty and strength of Fafner. How can we portray a foe worthy of Siegfried's awesome strength and ambition?

By innovating!

Rather than creating a ponderous set piece, this dragon has been conceived as 5 separate pieces, handled by supernumeraries. And what sets this dragon apart is – quite literally – it's ability to come apart! It can move as a single unit, but it can fly apart and be as insubstantial as a swarm of bees, but equally deadly. A dragon is a myth and an ideal. So far as we know, no one has ever seen a real live dragon. And as such, dragons are nebulous. Why must they be corporeal? Why must they be solid? Why not have a dragon with the substance of smoke, and the power of fire?

Opera is about telling a story, and Wagner took a huge story and set it to equally huge music. But this story is being told in a small theatre – so we adapt. The production adapts, and the audience adapts, and the music and story still stand strong. After I saw the movie Hook (which I loved, with Robin Williams and Dustin Hoffman), I went back and revisited the original TV production of Peter Pan with Mary Martin and Cyril Ritchard. I was appalled! The terrifying crocodile was a man in a rubber suit, the set was spare to the point of transparency, and Tinkerbell, for whom I clapped so hard, was a lightbulb on a string. But I went back to my cached and treasured memories, and remembered that in 1961 the crocodile was real for me, the hidey oak was a secret lair, and Tinkerbell was a blithe spirit worth clapping my 4-year-old hands hard together for, until she sprang miraculously back to life. All I had to do was believe.

Does Violetta the courtesan really fall head-over-heels in love with Alfredo in La Traviata? We allow ourselves to be convinced. Do we honestly believe that Ferrando and Guglielmo can fool their betrothed Fiordiligi and Dorabella in Cosi Fan Tutte? Of course not, but for the purpose of the story and Mozart's music, we let it pass. "The Italian Job" was totally preposterous movie, but a fun movie nevetheless. And believe it or not, some people actually even liked "Oceans Eleven" (don't get me started on the latest "Star Wars").

If you fall prey to the demons of "small theatre, smaller budget" for this Ring, you'll miss something. If you look at the broken (and later mended) sword, you'll see that they are done as open-work. Many of the props are (obviously and unashamedly) canvas on wire frame. The dragon is not fire-breathing, but is 5 separate semi-abstract pieces carried by small-bodied supernumeraries. It's all done on purpose! It is all part of telling the story in a way that fits the storytellers and the stage upon which they tell it. Trust me, it's not hard, you'll see Wagner's adaptation of the Norse myth in all its glory. All you have to do is believe...

Today was the Sitzprobe for Twilight of the Gods. Since I have a reputation to uphold as a lowbrow blogger commenting on a high art, let me live up to expectations by pointing out that a Sitzprobe is not a German proctologist (the word for that, I am told, is not surprisingly "Proktologe"). No, a Sitzprobe is a "seated tryout" (and in the pronounciation of both German words, the final "e" is not silent). It is a rehearsal with the full orchestra and cast, where the singers sit and sing.

In the frenetic world of rehearsals, where every day in the theatre is precious and there is no time to be wasted, a sitzprobe is a rare luxury. The singers don't have to worry about blocking, staging, or costumes, and for perhaps the only time, the orchestra gets to rehearse all the way through with the singers being totally focussed on the music. This the the first chance for both groups (who have, until now, largely been rehearsing separately), to get together and suss each other out. Up until now, the orchestra rehearses in it's own space, while the singers rehearse to piano accompanyment. In the months-long multi-tracked rehearsal timetable, this Sitzprobe has 3 hours blocked out (not much longer than the opera itself).

This version of the Ring is not the complete Wagnerian epic (the San Francisco Opera has done it in 17 hours), but rather an abridged version. Is this a good or a bad thing? I'd offer a vote for abridging. Wagner likes recitative, which keeps us from enjoying his music. This production has more music per minute, and as my Mother (who was a child refugee from Nazi Germany) points out: Wagner may have been an anti-Semitic old bastard, but he sure could write music!

By way of comparison, let's look at Shakespeare. The tragedy of Hamlet (perhaps the most famous play in the English language) can be told in epic proportions or sparely. Kenneth Branagh's version is gorgeous, and is over 4 hours long, yet the script for the Skinhead Hamlet is only 580 words long (more than half of that is stage direction, and of the remaining 313 words nearly 15% are a popular expletive). Yet both versions fully and completely tell the convoluted tale of the Prince of Denmark. So instead of an "abridged" Ring cycle, why don't we just call it "judiciously edited"?

I have done a lot of combing of the web to write this blog, and I have found some fun items. Here's one: the BBC Radio 3 offered a competition to synopsize the Ring in 100 words or less (no mean feat, I assure you). One of the winners, Graham Saxby, came up with four Haiku:

Das Rheingold Magic gold stolen Project finished on schedule God strikes bad bargain		Die Walkure Incest is punished A Valkyrie intervenes Now she pays the price
Siegfried Boy forges weapon Kills dragon and retrieves Ring Finds love at first sight		Gotterdammerung Hero tricked and slain Heroine is betrayed too It all ends in flames

Fortunately, this judiciously edited Ring has not been trimmed quite so thoroughly as these haiku nor as brutally as the Skinhead Hamlet. It retains the glory and grandeur of Wagner's music, without some of the boring talky bits. Scholars and purists may object, but I am not counted in their number.

Following the Sitzproben are the partial dress rehearsal. The singers are fully clothed and costumed (my lowbrow humor surfaces again, as there is no direction from the gutter but "up"), but they are not in wigs or makeup. After that come the full-dress, and then final dress rehearsal. I also see that there is a "fight call on stage". I suspect that this is not a venue for frustrated singers to call each other out with Marquess of Queensbury rules, but rather a chance to practice the stage fight. However, I will have to wait a few days to report on that... stay tuned!

Today the props and set for the Pittsburgh Ring left the Lyceum of St. Mary's and boarded a tractor-trailer bound for the loading dock of the Byham Theatre. One might think that the items could have been loaded into a U-Haul or two, and carried into the theatre by the long suffering supernumeraries, but this cannot be. The Byham is a union house, and union rules apply. So although the supers can load the truck at St. Mary's, it is the union movers at the Byham who have to unload it. And since there are probably rules about the number of truckloads and overtime pay, there was a single ginormous truck that backed into parking lot, ready to accept everything for the trip downtown.

When I arrived at the Lyceum, I thought that I would watch them load that truck. It turns out that it was late in arriving, so what I saw instead was the fascinating tableau of the arrayed props waiting in the noonday sun. A stack of spears, parts of Valhalla, and ranks of giants, men, and dwarves stood at parade rest, adding yet another category to the list formerly occupied by only mad dogs and Englishmen.

Inside the Lyceum, the set had been demolished for transport, and the dropcloth which had formerly delineated the sight lines and boundaries of the Byham stage was rolled up and stowed. The frozen explosion was split in two, one half still hanging from the balcony, the other waiting outside. The dragon was in pieces on the floor, and the odd skull littered the hallway. It was as if I was viewing an apartment which had been recently vacated, because, well... that's almost what it was. The company had practically lived here for almost two months, and they were moving on.

I keep citing movies because they give most of us our only backstage view of the theatrical world. Few of us as are lucky as I am, to be able to watch the process unfold in real-time. So I am here to tell you that most of the time, the movies get it wrong. In Being Julia, we are treated to weeks and weeks of rehearsals on the theatre stage. Likewise for Noises Off, Phantom, etc. But here's a question for you: if the company is rehearsing, how does the theatre make money? It doesn't!

So in a theatre like the Byham, productions of plays, movies, and musical happenings are going on almost all the time – and rehearsals are held elsewhere. Opera Theatre Pittsburgh rehearsed in the Lyceum and in the Stephen Foster Center in Lawrenceville, and only moved to the actual theatre when they were ready to "get serious" (and getting serious means upping the ante and paying rent on the big bad Byham to "just practice", with ticket income only being realized two weeks hence when performances start). Pittsburgh Opera has permanent rehearsal spaces in the downstairs of their Penn Avenue building, and only move into the cavernous Benedum Center in the final stages of rehearsal. And when The Pretenders or Tony Bennett come to town, they are probably going to move in and out of the house on the same day (the ever-present roadies take care of that). When you have to rent a hall, it's just financial good sense to minimize the number of non-performance days you spend in the theatre.

A similar metric applies to a company that owns its own space. Look at the schedule for Pittsburgh's own City Theatre. Only a week or two goes by between each performance in a season, and during that minimal hiatus, the seating is often rearranged, sets are built and installed, lighting is set, and the actors rehearse on-stage. Theatre downtime is lost income, so even a theatre company that owns its own stage tries to minimize downtime. The next time you see a movie about the theatre, no matter how entertaining it may be, ask yourself how real it is. At least Baz Luhrmann's Moulin Rouge got it right. They performed almost every night on stage, but there was a separate practice space for rehearsing new acts.

So today, the Ring made the big jump from practice space into the theatre. The clock is ticking, and the stage has not yet (literally, at least) been set. But figuratively, it has. The alchemical ingredients are all prepared and are being rallied. The cauldron is about to be stirred, and the ancient magical powers of story, myth, and music are gathering. A bare stage is going to be transformed into a landscape. Cat-gut, insect varnish, cork, brass and wood are coruscating and congealing into orchestral harmonies, and T-shirted singers will soon transform themselves into the living, breathing embodiment of millenia-old legends. Soon... it's showtime!