The Virginian-Pilot: Va. Opera’s “Magic Flute” relies on mastery of emotion
By Teresa Annas The Virginian-Pilot ©November 7, 2013
Poor Papageno. He catches birds and sells them for a living, is rough-hewn and earthy, and has fallen for a girl who flew the coop.
He cannot find his sweetheart, Papagena, anywhere. So in his comic woe, hanging-rope in hand, he sings:
“When you burn with love’s desire,
“Only death can quench the fire.”
Michael Shell, stage director for Virginia Opera’s production of Mozart’s “The Magic Flute,” which opens Friday at Harrison Opera House, leaned forward in his seat in the rehearsal hall, watching baritone David Pershall’s every little move.
As the comic relief in “Magic Flute,” Pershall’s acting must be as adept as his singing. The scene where Papageno contemplates hanging himself because he can’t find his “wifey-pifey” requires a series of swift mood changes.
The bird-man doesn’t really want to kill himself. He gives the world a chance to rescue him, but no one comes.
“Good, David,” Shell said after the scene. “I especially love when you check out if anybody’s around. It’s hilarious.”
Shell made a few suggestions. “When you come in, I see you already know she’s not here,” he told Pershall, and the character should not.
The director also asked him to emphasize the word “death” in the line “Only death can quench the fire.” “It’s like a realization,” he told the singer, who nodded from the stage.
“Do you want to do it again?” he asked Pershall.
“Yes, please,” the singer said.
Theater is hard enough, with its required mastery of language and movement to illuminate the meaning of a script and a character.
Add the challenges in operatic singing and that doubles the difficulty.
During a “Magic Flute” rehearsal last week, the director often acted out a reading of a line, a stressed word, or a gesture, to show the performers what he wants. Because the New Jersey director only has a few weeks to pull together a major production, that’s the most efficient way to put across his vision, he said.
“Magic Flute” relies more on naturalistic acting than conventional operas because there is spoken dialogue between songs, a musical play form called singspiel. Operas typically use recitative, a type of sung dialogue, between vocals.
“A lot of directing certainly is inspiration and coming up with ideas and the big theme,” Shell said. “But a good percentage of my job is negotiating personalities, figuring out how each person works, as an artist.
“And then trying to get them, through that understanding, to give the best performance that they can.”
Shell was an opera singer before becoming a director in 2006. He said his final performance was in 2005 in Virginia Opera’s “Romeo and Juliet.” He’s been familiar with “Magic Flute” since his youth, when he sang the role of “third spirit” for New York City Opera.
He knows how vulnerable performers can feel.
Throughout the rehearsal, Shell blended each gently offered “suggestion” with a robust compliment. Performers seemed fine with that.
Soprano Heather Buck, whose famously difficult revenge aria as Queen of the Night includes hard-to-hit high F’s, said she has watched Shell in action a lot. Though the opera’s story is like a fairy tale, “he’s trying to make things as though they come from the real world.”
She said the director is looking at “situations, reactions, emotions, so that everything blooms from a root in reality,” she said.
Like many opera singers, Buck had little training in acting, yet her acting is often praised in reviews. She said, “I try to make up a story about who this character is, what she’s been through and build something real. And when I’m doing it, I try to put myself aside.”
“I try to make it as though she’s a real person.”
It’s tricky blending emotions and the technical aspects of singing. If you get too emotional, it can interfere with the technical, Buck said. Emotion can make a voice tighten. “And when you think about so many soprano roles, anger, sorry and panic are right there. You have to keep the (vocal) instrument in control, and still find a way to physicalize the character.”
To physicalize is to act.
Because if you don’t and you’re just focusing on technique, “then you’re just standing there and singing,” she said. And that doesn’t move most modern audiences.
Baritone Pershall’s acting challenge is the quickly altering mind-set of Papageno. “He’s scatterbrained, and to get that to come across – OK, his train of thought just completely shifted from ‘I need a glass of wine’ to ‘Where’s the sexy chick I need to take home with me?’ – it’s really important to get those beats down.”
To a performer, beats usually mark a change in the character’s objective.
To master the beats is to make all the character’s mood changes clear. “And Michael’s incredibly helpful in that,” Pershall said.
“I think he’s very exacting, but for a good cause. So we can get these things across.”
Shell’s big theme for this “Magic Flute” is a dream.
His interpretation of the opera opens with the idea that the story was dreamed by the prince, Tamino.
In “The Magic Flute,” which was the last opera Mozart completed, in 1791, Tamino and Pamina, the daughter of the Queen of the Night, fall in love and must endure many trials.
Papageno, Tamino’s flawed but endearing sidekick, does not pass the trials, but also falls in love, with the equally earthy Papagena. Early on, the prince is given a magic flute by otherworldly ladies-in-waiting, who also give Papageno a music box; both instruments help them on their journey.
Shell said he has heard of a production in Florida that used the dream idea, but not in the same way. And because it’s a dream, he can do incongruous things, such as turning the three harmonizing ladies-in-waiting into a 1960s girl group.
But that’s not why he chose that path.
“My purpose for the dream is to show what dreams potentially can do for us in our daily lives,” he said. “How we can sometimes learn things about ourselves, things about the way we are living.
“And possibly then, through that recognition of that dream, realize a possible change that we could make. That’s my goal.”
Teresa Annas, 757-446-2485, teresa.annas@pilotonline.com
____
if you go
What Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s “The Magic Flute,” produced by Virginia Opera
Where and when 8 p.m. Friday, 2:30 p.m. Sunday and 7:30 p.m. Tuesday at Harrison Opera House, 160 E. Virginia Beach Blvd., Norfolk; 8 p.m. Nov. 15 and 2:30 p.m. Nov. 17 at Sandler Center for the Performing Arts, 201 Market St., Virginia Beach
Cost $29 to $114, with discounts available
More info 866- 673-7282, www.vaopera.org