O’Hara, Kelli

Subterms

    More stories

    • 138 Shares149 Views

      in Music

      Review: Renée Fleming Stars in ‘The Hours’ at the Met Opera

      by

      Kevin Puts and Greg Pierce’s new opera, conceived as a vehicle for the star soprano Renée Fleming, has its staged premiere at the Metropolitan Opera.“The Hours” — a new opera based on the 1998 novel and the 2002 film it inspired — features a redoubtable trio of prima donnas. And it was conceived as a vehicle for one of them, the soprano Renée Fleming, who is using it as her return to the Metropolitan Opera after five years.But on Tuesday, when the Met gave “The Hours” its staged premiere, only one of this trio of stars really shone: the mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato, sounding as confident and fresh, as sonorous and subtle, as she ever has in this theater.In this achingly — almost painfully — pretty, relentlessly stirring opera, with a score by Kevin Puts and a libretto by Greg Pierce, DiDonato plays Virginia Woolf, battling depression as she writes her novel “Mrs. Dalloway” in the early 1920s.The two other main characters illustrate the impact of that book through the decades. In 1949, Laura Brown (the Broadway veteran Kelli O’Hara), a pregnant Los Angeles homemaker, is reading it as she suffers Woolfian waves of despair. Fifty years after that, the sophisticated Manhattanite book editor Clarissa Vaughan (Fleming), who shares a first name with Woolf’s protagonist, is, like Clarissa Dalloway, preparing a party — this one for her onetime lover and longtime best friend, a renowned poet dying of AIDS.Michael Cunningham’s novel, Stephen Daldry’s film and the new opera all take us through one modest yet momentous day in the lives of these three women. Cunningham’s deft construction, with its precious pseudo-Woolf prose, discreetly highlights the threads of connection — flashes of the color yellow, degrees of same-sex desire — weaving the stories together.The film — which starred Meryl Streep as Clarissa, Julianne Moore as Laura, and, in a putty-nosed, Academy Award-winning turn, Nicole Kidman as Virginia — upped the portentousness, not least through Philip Glass’s soundtrack. Gravely impassioned and endlessly undulating, Glass’s score is so closely associated with this material that writing new “Hours” music is, as Puts said in a recent interview in The New York Times, something like writing a “Star Wars” opera without anything by John Williams.In Tom Pye’s scenic design, the three stories are presented on realistic islands that float around a bare stage.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThere are streaks of Minimalism in Puts’s watery rippling, as there are throughout his body of work. But though he repeats rhythmic and melodic motifs, the effect is gentler and less chugging than Glass, and — as in “Silent Night” (2012), Puts’s Pulitzer Prize-winning opera about a Christmas cease-fire during World War I — all else is pushed into the background by surging, strings-forward lyricism.Early in “The Hours,” Puts introduces passing hints of distinctions between the women’s worlds: for 1923, austere piano and a curdled atmosphere of syncopated winds and eerie pricks of strings; for 1949, some period light swing and echoes of the style of cheerful ad jingles. But nearly every scene in the opera eventually gets to the same place musically and dramatically, whipped into soaring emotion. The tear-jerking gets tiring.Pierce’s libretto artfully brings the women into even closer proximity than in the novel or film, enabling Puts to create, for example, gorgeous close-harmony duets for Virginia and Laura. But an awkward scene with Clarissa at the florist — Mrs. Dalloway, per Woolf’s classic opening line, is buying the flowers herself — doesn’t seem sure whether it is, or should be, comic relief. A late trio for Clarissa; her dying friend, Richard; and Louis, with whom they were enmeshed in a youthful love triangle, goes on far too long.The choral writing, which starts the opera pretty clearly representing the voices in the characters’ heads, gradually dissolves into a vaguer, more all-purpose texture — and occasionally into stentorian wails, like the villagers’ music in “Peter Grimes.” A vocalizing countertenor (John Holiday), mystifyingly called the Man Under the Arch in the cast list, hovers around, faintly suggesting the angelic.Yannick Nézet-Séguin, the Met’s music director, gave the work its premiere in March in concert with the Philadelphia Orchestra, which he also leads, and whose strings blossom in a way that sumptuously rewarded Puts’s score.But on Tuesday — with Nézet-Séguin making his first appearance at the opera house this season, nearly two months in — the Met’s orchestra brought muscular energy to what could easily turn turgid and syrupy. (The most risible part in Philadelphia, in which a contemporary novelist named, yes, Michael arrives onstage to swear his devotion to Woolf, has thankfully been excised.)In Tom Pye’s set, the three women’s domestic spaces are realistic islands floating around a bare stage, an efficient solution to a fast-flowing drama. But Phelim McDermott’s production clutters the smooth action with choristers, actors and dancers who, in Annie-B Parson’s dull choreography, sleepwalk, slouch, wield flowers like cheerleader pom-poms, wave pots and pans, slump atop chairs and sprawl over floors.Fleming, center, among flowers held by dancers in Annie-B Parson’s choreography.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesDenyce Graves, Sean Panikkar and Brandon Cedel bring dignity to the protagonists’ romantic partners; Kathleen Kim has a piquant cameo as the coloratura-wielding florist; and, best of all, Kyle Ketelsen sings the strong-willed, delusional Richard with haunting authority.O’Hara, her classical technique secure enough to have brought her success at the Met in “The Merry Widow” and “Così Fan Tutte,” is a focused actress — watch the quiet terror of her slow walk back toward her son from center stage — even if her bright, silvery soprano takes on a slight edge at full cry.But it is hard to focus on anyone else when DiDonato is onstage, often standing magnetically still. Her voice is clear in fast conversation, as she darkly relishes the words. Then, as the lines slow and expand, her tone grows smoky yet grounded, mellow yet potent. She plays Virginia as solemn and severe, but with a dry wit; if anything, she comes off as almost too robust to make paralyzing depression entirely plausible.DiDonato is a commanding enough singer and presence to render persuasive what had seemed in Philadelphia like bombastic overkill: a booming fantasy of London, a crashing evocation of incapacitating headaches. It’s only at the very top of its range that her voice tightens a bit; all in all, though, she gives a generous, noble portrayal, at its peak in her crushing delivery of lines from Woolf’s suicide note.The poignancy of the plot is amplified by Fleming, who has returned to the Met’s stage sounding pale: not frail or ugly, but at first almost inaudible and by the end underpowered, a pencil sketch of her former plushness. Having bid farewell to the standard repertory, this diva never wanted to age into opera’s supporting mother characters, and she has the influence to commission works like this, in which she can still be cast as the lead.But just as Clarissa Vaughan throbs with nostalgia for her life a few decades before, so we listen to Fleming at this point in her career and hear, deep in our ears, her supreme nights in this theater in the 1990s and early 2000s: as Mozart’s Countess, Verdi’s Desdemona, Carlisle Floyd’s Susannah, Tchaikovsky’s Tatyana.And as Strauss’s Marschallin in “Der Rosenkavalier,” in which she made her last staged appearance here in 2017, and whose sublime final trio is rendingly recalled in “The Hours,” as Clarissa, Laura and Virginia at last acknowledge one another, joining in sober then swelling harmony. It’s a superb sequence, a nod to Strauss that has a sweet longing all its own.“I wanted to make something good, something true,” Richard tells Clarissa near the end of the opera. “It didn’t have to be great.”That’s a reasonable standard. And, measured against it, Puts and Pierce have succeeded.The HoursThrough Dec. 15 at the Metropolitan Opera, Manhattan; metopera.org. More

    • 138 Shares179 Views

      in Music

      ‘The Hours’ Becomes an Opera. Don’t Expect the Book or Film.

      by

      “I think it needs to be more surreal,” the conductor Yannick Nézet-Séguin said from the orchestra pit of the Metropolitan Opera on a recent afternoon.The scene onstage was nothing but surreal — fragmented light beams suggesting a proscenium; towering, billowing curtains lit in dreamy shades of blue, their translucence revealing the impression of a building facade beyond. Yet Nézet-Séguin, the Met’s music director, was more interested in another element: the chorus, offstage and coloristic, an otherworldly fixture of an otherworldly environment.None of that is reminiscent of “The Hours” in its earlier iterations: Michael Cunningham’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 1998 novel; or the 2002 Stephen Daldry film, which was defined as much by its tensely churning Philip Glass score as by its Oscar-bait trio of leading stars, Nicole Kidman, Julianne Moore and Meryl Streep.But this is “The Hours” as adapted from both the book and the film by the writer Greg Pierce and the composer Kevin Puts. It is rendered as only opera can be: with an interplay of divas — Renée Fleming, Kelli O’Hara and Joyce DiDonato — who are enveloped by a restless and lush orchestra, and share a dream space with an ensemble of dancers who guide and observe them in Phelim McDermott’s staged premiere of the work, which opens at the Met on Tuesday.Renée Fleming — joined here by chorus members, the stage manager Scott Moon, kneeling, and the actress Drea Lucaciu — said she “loved, loved, loved” Stephen Daldry’s 2002 film adaptation of “The Hours.”Dina Litovsky for The New York Times“When I met Michael Cunningham,” Nézet-Séguin recalled, “he said that as a writer, words for him have to be sequential. You can’t superimpose words. But that’s where opera can melt and create parallels with the stories in real time.”AS A NOVEL, “The Hours” contains three interwoven stories, each unfolding for the most part quietly, over the course of a single day: Virginia Woolf struggles with depression while writing “Mrs. Dalloway”; Laura Brown, a homemaker in Southern California in 1949, feels oppressed by small tasks like baking a cake while just wanting to read that novel; and Clarissa Vaughan, an editor living in New York City half a century later, seems to embody “Mrs. Dalloway” as she prepares a party for her friend and former love Richard, a poet ravaged by AIDS.Fleming “loved, loved, loved” the Daldry film, she said in an interview over the summer. Some had thought she had made her farewell to staged opera in 2017, as the Marschallin in Strauss’s “Der Rosenkavalier,” one of her signature roles. But she was quickly looking for a new project at the Met, and her right-hand man, Paul Batsel, suggested an adaptation of the story by Puts. Fleming was into the idea; so was Peter Gelb, the Met’s general manager.The work would require three singers on the level of the film’s stars. Fleming took on Streep’s role, as Clarissa; then came DiDonato as Virginia Woolf (played by Kidman in the movie); and, Kelli O’Hara as Laura (Moore). O’Hara has made a career as a decorated Broadway star but is such an opera natural that she was the highlight of Mozart’s “Così Fan Tutte” in 2018.O’Hara has made a career as a decorated Broadway star.Dina Litovsky for The New York Times“I remember reading the book so hungrily,” she said. “The commentary on this time period, the survival, mental health, which I think is so appropriate right now. It just spoke to me so deeply.”In writing the opera, Pierce and Puts exploited what previous forms of the story couldn’t. “Some films have tried simultaneity,” Puts said. “But because of the nature of harmony and rhythmic notation, you can have things overlap here, and that’s very exciting. What you have to decide on is one sort of primary backdrop, musically, that unifies them. And that became interesting for me.”Puts’s score — which is written through, eclectic and soaringly lyrical — contains dreamy touches befitting the fluid nature of Pierce’s text, which has nearly 30 scenes that dissolve in and out of one another. A countertenor role, sung at the Met by John Holiday, in which the singer appears in different guises, can be seen as something like an angel of death or ferryman. A children’s chorus that Richard, the dying poet, hears in his head turns out to be the nieces and nephews of Virginia Woolf, holding a funeral for a bird. Other recursive phrases include music associated with Virginia that Clarissa overhears from a church choir.“What’s the meaning of that?” Puts said. “I’m not even sure what the answer is, but I think that’s what can be interesting.”From left, William Burden, Fleming and Kyle Ketelsen in rehearsal.Dina Litovsky for The New York TimesHaunting the music is Glass’s Minimalist soundtrack for the “Hours” film. Puts called it “a beautiful score,” and recognized the danger in putting up his own work against it. “It’s almost like, would you write a ‘Star Wars’ opera?” he said, referring to John Williams’s famous music for that franchise. “No, I wouldn’t. It would be the dumbest thing in the world because it’s so iconic.”But, Puts added, while there are suggestions of a Minimalist style in the “Hours” opera — not for the first time in his compositional career — the work organically developed into something else. “The opera is so different that it’s its own thing,” he said. Nézet-Séguin described the score as having “just enough Minimalism,” but bringing “it to another, more lyrical, approach.”With the cast in place early, Puts tailored the score to Fleming, DiDonato and O’Hara. “I imagine if you’re writing a screenplay and you know Robert De Niro is going to play this character,” he said, “then every line you write, you imagine him delivering it.” And, he added, he is happy to reflect the specificity of their sounds and revise accordingly during rehearsals rather than plan for later productions and casts: “In a case like this, I’m not as concerned about the future.”All three stars have responded positively to the way their roles sit in their voices. This summer, DiDonato said that while reading through the score, she would tell herself, “Oh, Kevin, that’s the money note.” And Fleming, who has worked with Puts before — “He knows my voice really well” — said that his writing was singer friendly, with phrases separated, “so you’re not really stuck in a high register or a challenging tessitura consistently.”Kelli O’Hara, who sings the role of Laura, said: “I remember reading the book so hungrily, The commentary on this time period, the survival, mental health, which I think is so appropriate right now.”Dina LitovskyPuts developed a sound world for each woman. Clarissa’s, he said, is quintessentially American. Virginia’s draws on piano and an ornamental language befitting an earlier time in the English countryside, but with a winding harmony that, he hopes, evokes Woolf’s writing. Laura’s music, however, is more like that of her husband — of darkly cheery post-World War II domesticity that becomes something of a prison for her to escape from. All three come together in the finale, in a succession and layering of style.Nézet-Séguin conducted the world premiere with the Philadelphia Orchestra in March, and felt, hearing it for the first time, that “Kevin got so much right.” A few things have changed between then and now: the tessitura of the chorus, for instance, and some cuts along with additions. Crucially, the Met’s presentation is different simply for being staged.McDERMOTT, whose Met credits include blockbuster productions of Glass’s “Satyagraha” and “Akhnaten,” had been told that the opera’s constant shifting of time and place would make it “impossible” to direct. Yet he took it on, joined by the choreographer Annie-B Parson, the mind behind the infectiously exuberant movement in David Byrne’s “American Utopia.”“It’s like directing three operas on top of each other,” McDermott said. “There are so many scenes, and it’s filmic, so you need to get from place to place in a way that’s enjoyable rather than holding weight.”All three stars have responded positively to the way their roles sit in their voices. This summer, DiDonato, right, said that while reading through the score, she would tell herself, “Oh, Kevin, that’s the money note.” Dina LitovskyMcDermott and Parson have long been at work on “The Hours,” including a workshop over the summer, months before the singers arrived for rehearsals. “I was given time with the dancers first,” Parson said, “which was very luxurious.” She didn’t end up using everything but experimented with having them “defy the weight of the architecture” in magical ways that included blowing sets with their breath to move them, or occupying the set like cats — observational and impossible to read.Parson said she has been guided in part by Woolf herself. “Experimentation was the heart of work,” she said. “That was always on my mind — gender fluidity, feminism — and I wanted to start with her.”The dancers, McDermott said, “set the atmosphere of the scenes.” They are involved with maintaining the action’s momentum, but they also move with a vocabulary that is sometimes in harmony with scenes across time, like spirits. The choreography, Parson said, is “an embroidery of these worlds.”A week before opening night, the opera’s many moving parts were still finding their places. There was talk of many tears during rehearsals, but there has also been laughter. An emotional high point — Richard’s suicide by falling out a window — was a clunky comedy of errors that had DiDonato, who was watching from a seat in the auditorium, joking, “Guffman called.”McDermott referred to this as the moment that comes in any rehearsal process when it’s difficult to avoid thinking, “Oh my God, we’ve taken on too much.”Then, he added, something tends to happen. “You want all the performers and musicians to be resonating with each other in a perfect, beautiful way,” he said. “Then the piece begins to speak to itself. But what I’ve noticed is, it doesn’t really turn up until the audiences comes. That’s when you’ll see how strong the atmosphere can be.” More

    • 138 Shares189 Views

      in Music

      Three Divas Give Voice to ‘The Hours’ at the Met Opera

      by

      New York City’s opera event of the fall — an adaptation of “The Hours” having its staged premiere at the Metropolitan Opera in November — started with a pitch from Renée Fleming.Fleming, the superstar soprano, was mulling over new projects when Paul Batsel, her right-hand man, suggested “The Hours,” Michael Cunningham’s novel inspired by Virginia Woolf’s “Mrs. Dalloway,” which weaves together one day in the lives of three women across time: Woolf, writing her book; a midcentury homemaker named Laura Brown, who is reading it; and a 1990s editor named Clarissa Vaughan, who, like Clarissa Dalloway, is organizing a party, here for a friend diminished by AIDS.“The Hours” won Cunningham a Pulitzer Prize in 1999, and was adapted into an Oscar-winning film in 2002, starring a power trio of Meryl Streep, Julianne Moore and Nicole Kidman. Crucially, that movie was scored by Philip Glass, whose soundtrack unified the three stories as lucidly as the motif of “Mrs. Dalloway” did.“I loved, loved, loved the film when it came out,” Fleming, who is singing the role of Clarissa, said in an interview. “It haunted me and stayed with me. The performances were so brilliant, and when I went back to it — all of these ideas, suicide, their lives as L.G.B.T.Q. people in New York City at that time, the period, all that was powerful for me. So when Paul suggested it, I thought: That’s perfect. Three divas, what could be better?”Peter Gelb, the Met’s general manager, agreed. A composer was already in hand — Kevin Puts, who won the Pulitzer Prize for “Silent Night” in 2012, working here with the librettist Greg Pierce — but the company needed two more stars. Enter Kelli O’Hara, a Tony Award-decorated musical theater actress with opera bona fides (even at the Met, where she was a standout as Despina in Mozart’s “Così Fan Tutte”), in the role of Laura; and, as Virginia Woolf, the mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato, a house regular and audience favorite.The Philadelphia Orchestra premiered “The Hours” in concert form earlier this year, conducted by Yannick Nézet-Séguin. Reviewing that performance, Zachary Woolfe wrote in The New York Times that, “the new work is, like ‘Silent Night,’ direct, effective theater, with a cinematic quality in its plush, propulsive underscoring, its instinctive sense for using music to move things along.”Nézet-Séguin, the Met’s music director, will be in the pit when the opera arrives at the Met in November, directed by Phelim McDermott (most recently of “Akhnaten” fame) and choreographed by Annie-B Parson. Spread around the world but speaking together on a shared video call, the production’s three stars discussed how they are preparing for rehearsals and for bringing their characters to the opera stage. Here are edited excerpts from the conversation.“It really is evocative,” O’Hara said of Kevin Puts’s score. “The more I listen to it, the more I have it circling in me; it’s one of those things that you become obsessed with.”Thea Traff for The New York TimesThese three roles were written with your voices in mind. Can you explain how that plays out in practice?KELLI O’HARA Can I just give a shout-out to Kevin Puts? To have a composer who’s living now and writing now and writing so beautifully now — Renée’s choice of him was so special. He came to a couple of sing-through sessions just to hear me and write a little bit more specifically. I do not take that for granted. To listen and make changes appropriately, he’s quite a mensch that way.RENÉE FLEMING He’s written a lot for me, and he knows my voice really well. The thing that works for me is that the phrases have separation between them, so you’re not really stuck in a high register or a challenging tessitura consistently. And that’s what makes it possible. I’m loving [singing] it in my living room, so let’s hope that translates to the big house.JOYCE DiDONATO I’m looking at the page, I’m looking at the score, and I’m like: Oh Kevin, that’s the money note that audiences will be waiting for. One of the cool things, as I’m working on it, is that I’m finding the groove very easily. It is being crafted for us, but the sign of a really good composer is that it’s clear this can have a life beyond this production. He’s writing it in such a lyrical way that a lot of different voices will be able to take this on. That’s what we want; we want these projects to have a legacy.What do you think makes this version of “The Hours” effective opera?FLEMING Libretti are hard because you have to reduce the number of words to a minimum in order to have room for the music, and that’s especially true here. Greg Pierce’s libretto is concise, and it’s colorful and just beautifully wrought.O’HARA It feels like there’s a constant movement of the drama. That makes it feel, in a way, cinematic. Some of the score as well. It really is evocative. The more I listen to it, the more I have it circling in me; it’s one of those things that you become obsessed with.FLEMING Kevin is not afraid to write something that’s moving and beautiful for the general public. And that is something that, in my lifetime, composers in opera have struggled with.DiDONATO This is an emotional story. Some of the recent pieces that I have seen are very graphic and angular and have sanitized, in a way, the emotion. And I don’t find it in any way maudlin and saccharine — which used to be good words in opera, but I understand why we hesitate to indulge in that. But that, in some ways, is what opera does best.One of the things I look for, certainly with a new piece, is: Why does this need to be sung? What I think they have done really brilliantly is the overlay, the way you can have the same emotional experience by different people in different contexts. And that’s something that can happen easily in opera and not so much in the cinema or theater world. There’s a scene where Virginia Woolf is trying to write, and she’s struggling with just getting the day started, and then Laura comes in and she’s reading it. We have the same words, one is being created and one is being received, and they both are being felt in very different ways. That adds a huge layer of complexity that really works on the opera stage.“We’re always competing against ghosts of the past who created roles,” said DiDonato, who plays Virginia Woolf. Ana Cuba for The New York TimesHow are you coming at these characters, which have been famously occupied by Hollywood stars? Kelli, in your case, this is the second time you are taking on one of Julianne Moore’s roles, after the musical adaptation of “Far From Heaven.”O’HARA I didn’t go back to the movie; that’s sort of a rule for me. If I’ve seen it, I won’t watch it again. Because the only way to make it human or different or new is to put your own vision through it and metabolize it in your own body, your heart and bring it forth. I think that’s what the three of us will do. Opera is very different from film. I haven’t even really considered it being up for comparison.DiDONATO We’re always competing against ghosts of the past who created roles. To me, the key is always, I do the research, but my job is to put the score in front of me and not create past versions. I learned that quite a long time ago. Go to the source, go to the score, the text, and you have to leave the rest behind.FLEMING Well, I’ve always wanted to play Meryl Streep [laughs]. But also, for me, this is one of the only times I’ve gotten to perform a period from my own lifetime. I still have clothing from the ’90s.O’HARA That’s wild. I’m going back to the ’50s. Just put me there all the time.DiDONATO You do get the cutest clothes from that period. I have a little bit of wardrobe envy.You have praised how “The Hours” — whether the book, the film or this opera — captures women’s feelings and experiences. All were created by men. What do they get right?FLEMING This is tricky, because obviously I was pressing for women in the creative team, so we have a choreographer. I think it’s important, moving forward, to appropriately give representation to the stories being told. Even the fact that Denyce Graves [in the role of Sally] and I are lovers in this. This may be something that people clock — that [the queer] community is not represented, at least in the principals. It’s very challenging, on so many different fronts.That said, I do think they did a very good job, and Michael Cunningham did a great job. I have a long relationship with Strauss and Hofmannsthal; there are historical pairings of librettist and composer that have really shockingly presented a woman’s inner life extremely well.“Kevin is not afraid to write something that’s moving and beautiful for the general public,” Fleming said. “And that is something that, in my lifetime, composers in opera have struggled with.”Thea Traff for The New York TimesO’HARA From the Laura Brown perspective, Michael Cunningham is writing his own mother. Look at Sondheim; there is this precedent of artists who work things out in their art. So I want to join them and bring out their story, and my own story with my mother, and my own experience of being a mother. You do have someone who’s writing from a very real place. I’ll come in, and I have to make this woman human and empathetic in the same way. But they are writing from deep knowledge and pain.FLEMING AIDS is at the center of Michael Cunningham’s book as well. A friend of mind said, “I’m glad the Met is finally producing a gay story,” and I thought: Huh, I thought this was about three women. There are different perspectives in this piece. It’s wonderful in that way.DiDONATO For me, I think they’ve captured the captivity sensation that Virginia felt, or that I imagine she felt at that time — the limitations put on her, what it was to be a creative genius as a woman. We do need representation at the table, as Renée is saying. But one of the magical things about the theater is that it’s always about getting in someone else’s head. And that can be me, a girl from Kansas City, trying to understand Virginia Woolf. It can be a man trying to understand a woman, a son about his mother. It’s dangerous if we start blocking those creative outlets.What’s exciting is that we are demanding that those doors are open to everybody. But I don’t think that means we should shut doors completely. We’d be missing out on a lot of great art. I think it’s thrilling that these men want to tell this story. Let’s have a woman write it as well. We have lots of “Barber of Sevilles” and “Figaros.” Let a woman write “The Hours,” and we can compare. More

    • 163 Shares119 Views

      in Television

      When Covid Dropped the Curtain on Broadway Actors, TV Kept the Lights On

      by

      New and returning TV series like “The Gilded Age” and “The Good Fight” have been a lifeline for celebrated theater actors during the pandemic. Will TV, or theater, ever look the same?Back in March, the actress Kelli O’Hara arrived on Rhode Island’s Gold Coast. A company of theater heroes, with enough combined Tonys to crowd a mansion’s mantels, met her there. “It was almost like Broadway said, ‘We’re shutting down,’” O’Hara recalled during a recent telephone interview. “So 20 of us got together and said, ‘Let’s go do a play in a seaside town.’”But O’Hara — and colleagues like Christine Baranski, Nathan Lane, Debra Monk and Cynthia Nixon — hadn’t come to Newport to for a summer stock job. Or even for the clam cakes. They were on location for “The Gilded Age,” a robber baron costume drama from Julian Fellowes that will premiere on HBO in 2022.With Broadway theaters closed since last April, “The Gilded Age” joins current series like “The Good Fight,” “Younger” and “Billions” and upcoming ones like “The Bite” and a “Gossip Girl” reboot in providing a glitzy refuge for theater stars during the shutdown. Broadway performers have always appeared here and there on scripted series. (No 2000s Playbill bio was complete without a “Law & Order” credit.) But this past year, television work — which is typically better paid than theater and more luxurious in its perks — was pretty much the only show in town.Benton as Natasha in the musical “Natasha, Pierre & The Great Comet of 1812,” which earned her a Tony nomination. Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“People are just really excited to be working and to have human contact and to be on set and telling a story again,” Allison Estrin, the casting director of “Billions,” said. “Every actor I’ve talked to has just expressed nothing but gratitude and excitement for being able to work right now.”And because every stage actor was suddenly available, television has never seemed so theatrical. (You could cast a credible Sondheim revival with actors on “The Good Fight” alone.) Will television ever look the same? Will Broadway?A year or so ago, casting directors would have had to compete with — or maneuver around — Broadway commitments. “It was always a scheduling nightmare to work around people’s curtain times,” Robert King, a creator of “The Good Wife” and “The Bite” said.“Sorry to say it, but it worked for us,” he added about the shutdown, “because we could schedule more freely.”Tavi Gevinson.The CWAdam Chanler-Berat.The CWTavi Gevinson and Adam Chanler-Berat, stars of the new “Gossip Girl,” had both committed to a revival of the Stephen Sondheim musical “Assassins.” “We were going to work overtime and do back flips to make it work for them,” Cassandra Kulukundis, the “Gossip Girl” casting director, said. The pandemic put an end to back flips. Did that make Kulukundis’s life easier?“It made my life sad,” she said. “I want to see those people working.”Although some shows had completed casting before Covid-19 hit New York, many have stepped up with an express desire to employ stage actors. “Everyone’s aware that it’s a horrible time,” Warren Leight, the showrunner for “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit,” said. “And if you can help out, you do.”“So I just made the call early on,” he continued: “Let’s make this the year where the first pool of actors we go to is a Broadway actor, the Off Broadway actors.” He estimates that he has employed an average of 10 theater actors — Jelani Alladin, André De Shields, Adriane Lenox and Eva Noblezada among them — per episode this season.Robert and Michelle King conceived the goofy horror comedy “The Bite,” in part, to keep stage actors working. “Employing people that were out of work from the theater was uppermost in our mind,” Michelle King said. She doesn’t think that the six-episode show, which debuts May 21 on Spectrum, would have worked without stage performers. Filmed comparatively early in the pandemic, it was mostly shot remotely, in actors’ homes.“Because people are acting by themselves, you really need people that are at the very top of their craft,” she said. “If we hadn’t had access to those people, the show wouldn’t have come together creatively.”Like Gevinson and Chanler-Berat, Steven Pasquale (as seen in “The Bite”) was committed to a revival of the Stephen Sondheim musical “Assassins” before Covid-19 hit New York.Spectrum Originals/CBS StudiosFor Steven Pasquale, a Broadway veteran who was also slated for the “Assassins” revival, “The Bite” provided a welcome alternative. “It felt a little bit like we were making theater, even though we were making a TV show, because there were so many theater people involved.”“The Gilded Age,” which employs 17 Tony winners and nominees in its cast, had a similar put-on-a-show ethos. “There is something about theater actors on a television set,” said Audra McDonald, a six-time Tony winner and a star of “Gilded,” “The Bite” and “The Good Fight.” “It feels like it’s a repertory company.”Nixon said that “Gilded” had brought her back together with theater co-stars from her 20s, 30s, 40s and 50s. During a recent shoot, Nixon recalled, she looked at the cast members in the scene and said to Baranski, “We could totally do ‘The Importance of Being Earnest’ right here.”This isn’t to suggest that casting stage performers is an act of charity or an excuse for an impromptu reunion. Yes, Broadway actors may have less on-camera experience than some of their Hollywood counterparts. But they bring an ease with stylized language, as well as a professionalism and can-do attitude that inures them to the hectic rhythms and sudden changes of a television set, especially a set operating under Covid-19 precautions.From left, Audra McDonald, Christine Baranski and Cush Jumbo in “The Good Fight.” “There is something about theater actors on a television set,” McDonald said. “It feels like it’s a repertory company.” Patrick Harbron/CBS“People who work in live theater, where anything can go wrong, they’re always on their toes,” said Kulukundis, the “Gossip Girl” casting director. Christine Baranski, a Tony winner and a star of “The Good Fight” and “The Gilded Age,” put it this way: “We have a skill set and a respect for process. You hire a theater actor and they’ll come in prepared.”Theater actors are unruffled by specialized jargon. Estrin can always tell when a stage actor walks into the audition room for “Billions.” An exuberant drama set among financiers and the regulators who love-hate them, its current season includes the Tony nominees Daniel Breaker, Stephen Kunken and Sarah Stiles.“It isn’t easy dialogue to say,” Estrin said. “They walk in the door and make it look easy.”Brandon Victor Dixon and McDonald in the Broadway musical “Shuffle Along.” McDonald tried for years to get a song written into “The Good Fight,” finally succeeding in Season 3.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“Younger,” a pacey comedy set in the world of Manhattan publishing, often relies on musical theater stars to deliver its zingers. “These are actors that are able to make the words sing,” said Steven Jacobs, one of the show’s casting directors.When it comes to words that people might have used a century ago, stage actors typically have an advantage. Not every film or TV actor has done period work, but theater-trained actors usually have at least a few Shakespeare plays and Shavian comedies under their era-appropriate belts.“We tend to have experience with having to wrap our mouths around different types of texts,” Denée Benton, a Tony nominee who stars in “The Gilded Age” said. “I’ve spent my entire career in corsets. So when this show came around, I was like, ‘Yeah, I know how to do this.’”Doing this without giving up theater wasn’t always an option. Back in the ’90s, when Baranski needed to earn more money and decided to seek television roles, she had to move to Los Angeles.“There wasn’t enough TV work in New York back then,” she said. “Now there is, and it’s a great thing for the theater community. God, I wish it had happened earlier.”The Emmy- and Tony-winning actor André De Shields in scene from “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit” The show employed an estimated 10 theater actors per episode this season.Virginia Sherwood/NBCDuring this lost Broadway season, New York-based series have allowed Broadway talent to keep their health insurance and pay their mortgages without having to uproot their lives. Television has also provided a spiritual solace, a means to practice their art when other modes were unavailable. (Or as in the case of Zoom theater, glitchy and not always satisfying.)“The creative safety of knowing I’m going to get to use my gifts, the financial safety of knowing that I’m going to be able to pay my bills for a time period, it’s priceless,” Benton said. O’Hara put it even more feelingly. “It’s the most beautiful gift I’ve ever had,” she said of her work on “The Gilded Age.” “It fooled me into thinking I’m still doing theater.”Mandy Patinkin, a Broadway legend and a series regular in the coming season of “The Good Fight,” tried out retirement last year, after a nearly decade-long run on “Homeland.” He hated it. Returning to television gave him a renewed sense of purpose.“Part of what Covid taught me, among so many things, was the appreciation of the privilege of having a vocation that would structure my day and my life and my evenings and my time on Earth,” he said.De Shields won a Tony for his performance in the Broadway production of “Hadestown.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesSlowly, Covid’s heavy curtain is starting to rise. Most of New York’s capacity restrictions, including those governing live theater, are scheduled to end on May 19 with social distancing requirements still in place; Broadway theaters, which depend on tourists and are too expensive to operate with limited audiences, have been cleared to reopen at full capacity beginning on Sept. 14.But with so many actors having found comfort and health insurance in television in the past year, will they return to the stage?Even before the pandemic, casting plays and musicals had become more difficult, said Bernard Telsey, a casting director for “The Gilded Age” and a co-artistic director of MCC Theater. “Everyone is wanting to do television now,” he said. This applies as much to younger stage actors as to seasoned ones. “They’re five minutes out of Juilliard, and they’re looking at a television show,” he said.But there are pleasures — for actors and audiences — that television can’t offer, at least not often and not without a lot of begging first. There are few high Cs on TV, and fewer kick lines. But “Younger” has included a few songs, among them a blissful “9-to-5,” led by Miriam Shor, an original cast member from “Hedwig and the Angry Inch.” There’s also a scene this season in which the series lead, Sutton Foster, dances to a song from “Thoroughly Modern Millie,” a show she starred in.“I’m always looking for little excuses to see her really step out and perform a little bit,” Darren Star, the creator of “Younger,” said.McDonald tries to make TV just a little more theatrical. For years, she asked the Kings to write a song into “The Good Fight.” They finally agreed and in the third season, McDonald and Baranski’s characters break into “Raspberry Beret” during late-night case prep.“We had a ball doing that,” McDonald said. “Because we knew it was as close to a musical number as we would ever get.”Matt Stevens More

    • 125 Shares149 Views

      in Music

      Florence Birdwell, Singing Teacher to Broadway Stars, Dies at 96

      by

      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyFlorence Birdwell, Singing Teacher to Broadway Stars, Dies at 96She was a tough yet empathetic voice professor at Oklahoma City University for 67 years. Two of her students, Kelli O’Hara and Kristin Chenoweth, won Tony Awards.The voice teacher Florence Birdwell in 2015. She helped her students unlock the mysteries of captivating an audience.Credit…Julieta Cervantes for The New York TimesFeb. 25, 2021Updated 3:57 p.m. ETFlorence Birdwell, an inspiring voice teacher whose many students included the Tony Award-winning musical stars Kelli O’Hara and Kristin Chenoweth, died on Feb. 15 in Yukon, Okla. She was 96.Her death, in an assisted living facility, was confirmed by her son Brian.Professor Birdwell taught voice from 1946 to 2013 at Oklahoma City University, establishing herself as a dramatic, no-nonsense mentor. She helped aspiring musical theater and opera singers unlock the mysteries of captivating an audience, but she could also make her students weep with her candid feedback on their progress.“That’s life,” she told The New York Times in 2015. “If they can’t take the criticism they’ve asked for — don’t come.”During a visit to Manhattan in 2015 to see the Tony-nominated performances of Ms. O’Hara in “The King and I” and Ms. Chenoweth in “On the Twentieth Century” — Ms. O’Hara would win (Ms. Chenoweth had already won a Tony in 1999, for “You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown”) — Professor Birdwell conducted a master class of about a dozen former students.“At 90, she is girlish and soft one minute, fearsome and sharp the next,” Sarah Lyall wrote in The New York Times, “and she commands all the attention in the room.”After Scott Guthrie performed “It All Fades Away,” from “The Bridges of Madison County,” for the class, Professor Birdwell cheered, then ticked off his imperfections: He was tensing his shoulders, forcing his vowels and doing something wrong with his breathing.He sang the song several more times. She pointed to a spot where his neck met his shoulder and said: “You’re putting a strain on that muscle. I don’t want it to get worse.”Professor Birdwell emphasized that singers must memorize the words of a song before learning the melody, so that the lyrics are not only in their vocabularies but also in their hearts.“You have to open up a little bit of your insides,” she told The Times. “You have to learn about yourself as a person.”Professor Birdwell backstage in 2015 with her former student Kelli O’Hara. She traveled to New York to watch Ms. O’Hara in “The King and I” and another former student, Kristen Chenoweth, in “On the Twentieth Century.”Credit…Julieta Cervantes for The New York TimesFlorence Gillam Hobin was born on Sept. 3, 1924, in Douglas, Ariz., on the border of Mexico, and raised in Santa Fe, N.M., and Lawton, Okla. Her mother, Grace (Gillam) Hobin, was a legal secretary; her father, Warner, was not a part of Florence’s life from the time she was young.Florence’s operatic soprano helped her earn a scholarship to Oklahoma City University after a music professor heard her sing with her high school orchestra. Before she graduated in 1945 with a bachelor’s degree in voice, her plans to perform on Broadway were derailed by an infection in her throat that damaged her larynx.Recalling the critical moment for The Oklahoman in 2015, she said that she tearfully told her teacher, Inez Silberg, who advised her, “You cannot sing now, maybe, but you can certainly talk.” She suggested that Florence teach, and sent her three students.“Each one of them was terribly lost in one way or another,” Professor Birdwell said. “And what I learned was warmth and caring and love. And it stayed with me all my teaching life.”One of those students was Barbara Fox (now Barbara DeMaio), an opera singer who, at 19, was in an emotional spiral: She had been sexually assaulted, and her father had recently died. When her voice teacher threw her out of her studio, her music theory teacher suggested that she study with Professor Birdwell — who, she recalled, later told her, “‘I couldn’t believe they were so willing to throw out the talent I saw in you.’”“And she made me go to therapy,” Ms. DeMaio said by phone. “She took me by the nape of the neck and said, ‘I will not let you waste this talent.’”Ms. DeMaio went on to perform widely in Europe is now a professor of voice at the University of Central Oklahoma and the executive director of the Painted Sky Opera company, based outside Oklahoma City in Edmond.“When I say that Florence Birdwell saved my life,” she said, “I’m not exaggerating.”In 1985 Professor Birdwell received the Governor’s Arts Award, the State of Oklahoma’s highest arts honor. She was inducted into the Oklahoma Higher Education Heritage Society’s Hall of Fame in 2012.And in the late 1950s she recovered her voice, if at a slightly lower register, and performed regularly, most notably in an annual one-woman show in Oklahoma City during the 1980s and ’90s, in which she sang music from various genres and recited poetry and short stories.“People have so much inside of them that just has to come out,” she told The Oklahoman in 1990 before her 11th annual show. “This is my coming-out party.”In addition to her son Brian, Professor Birdwell is survived by her daughter, Robyn Birdwell; seven grandchildren; and one great-grandson. Another son, Todd, died in 1980, and her husband, Robert, died in 2013.Despite Professor Birdwell’s sometimes daunting style, Ms. O’Hara said she had never feared her.“She ripped me down, she tore me apart,” she told The Oklahoman in a video interview in 2015. “She built me back up, and every single bit of it seemed to be the path that I was supposed to be on. It never scared me. It just made me feel right.”During her Tony Award acceptance speech, Ms. O’Hara thanked Professor Birdwell “for giving me wings.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More