Campbell Vertesi

I had a very interesting discussion with one of the coaches here recently.  I have always been of the opinion that acting in opera can be - indeed, should be - every bit as nuanced as stage acting.  That is to say, your characters should have all the depth and complexity of a real human being.  I have always placed a special emphasis on subtext in my arias, so that they can be more than just "he's sad".  But this particular coach disagreed.

The argument is that we have many more constraints in opera, which prevent us from taking too much freedom with our characters.  In the first place, the audience generally doesn't speak the language we're singing, so nuance in the text does not get conveyed.  There are also the musical constraints of timing, pitch and duration. Stage actors get more tools than operatic singers do, so they can expect their audiences to pick up on character subtleties and thought much better.

One example is the idea of Carmen, who seems to have no fear whatsoever, laughing in the face of predestined death with her last lines to Don Jose.  I think that something like that would make the scene much more intense, highlighting her acceptance of fate in a scary sort of way.  A character who laughs as she goes to her death would have me on the edge of my seat... if nothing else in fascination at this twisted person.  But according to this argument, opera audiences couldn't get anything that deep.  They'd just wonder why she was laughing, and lose their connection to the opera.

The example that brought the whole discussion up was Colline's "coat" aria from La Boheme.  I see Colline as a guy who uses humor and pseudo-intellectualism as a defense mechanism.  When Mimi enters, he goes from this chatty jokester to dead silent for about 15 minutes, watching everything take place.  When he finally does say something, I don't think he's aware of any of the symbolism of the coat or any of that crap.  I think he's just grasping at straws to try and cope with the reality of the imminent death of a dear friend.  Humor is his defense - he is trying to make a joke at a funeral, because he just doesn't get what to do.  

The piece comes to a climax with this stupid line about the books in his pockets, not because the pockets are of any importance,  but because Colline is struggling to keep this defense up against the weight of the situation.  He gets poco rall and rallentando during that line, until he reaches the words "filosofi e poeti" (philosophers and poets), ostensibly describing the works in the pockets of the coat.  In my interpretation, this is where he finally gets it, and realizes that what he's really doing is singing a funeral for his friend.  After all, he is a philosopher, and Rodolfo the mourning lover is a poet.  The only things Colline can manage to say after that moment are broken "addio"s, in ever descending lines.

I think that this aria is Colline's defense falling apart, as he is forced to come to terms with the reality of Mimi's death.  The text is so straightforward, but it is the subtext that makes the aria so poignant.

Apparently opera audiences can't be expected to pick up on anything so complex as a human being struggling to keep it together, and then falling apart emotionally under the weight of the situation.  I'd like to hear your thoughts...

Today I started working on the physical life of Bartolo.  Unfortunately, without a cane in Cincinnati I'll have to wait until I get to California to work on the "walk."  But there is much more than just a walk to a character!  My favorite is figuring out the nervous tic.

Most people have a nervous habit they do, something they do when they get emotional, or angry.  If this action is consistent throughout your character's physical and emotional life, it will help make the image of this person appear real in the audiences eyes.  Unfortunately, it's easy to go overboard with this.  If you're always doing your nervous "thing", it becomes pretty transparent and fake.  The balance is a careful one.  (think about Indiana Jones' little smirk, or any of Chris Farley's character's nervous physicalizations.  These bring some color to the character, and an easy physical cue for the audience of his state of mind)

I decided that Bartolo's nervous tic will be with a pencil, or a pen perhaps.  A little twirl, or some funny trick he does almost without thinking.  I like this idea because not only does it give me a very personal prop to work with, not only does it give me a physical action that can keep me occupied while Bartolo thinks, but it's a very distinctive sort of action too.  Plus, the possibility exists of Bartolo getting particularly worked up and breaking the pencil - that's good for effect, depending on how you play it.

 Some other examples... my Colline folds the lapels of his coat obsessively, and I've always wanted to learn a few knife twirling tricks for Sparafucile.

Anyways, I'm spending quality time at pentrix.com - a very good place to waste an afternoon if you want to learn tricks with a pencil. :) 

Time for Part II in our several part series, Building a Character for Opera.  Today we'll talk about external sources, from books to your own fertile imagination. 

When preparing a role, you must know off the bat about the sources for the opera.  Many operas are based on books (or series' of books, as in Don Giovanni). Some are based on historical figures and events.  Very few are completely original material.   This means that after you've strip-mined the score for character insights, there is a whole wealth of information out there for you to discover! 

Many singers skimp on this level of preparation. I urge you to do better! So much of your character is already created for you, and you never know what key information is left out of the score.  For example, I was an idiot and didn't do my history work until the second week of Giulio Cesare rehearsals.  Did you know that Tolomeo was a 15 year old brat of a king?  The fact of his age completely changed the way I played this villain character.

The book - or the encyclopedia, as the case may be - will give you plenty of new information about your character, and just reading it will do a lot of the "fleshing out" work for you.  This work never stops, though!  I like to go online, and take personality quizzes "in character".  These quizzes make you ask yourself all sorts of questions you would not normally think of... they're great for that!  And here comes the best part: when confronted with a question where the answer is not in the book or the score, you just make it up.

That's right.  Make-believe.  On a basic level, acting is really just a very highly developed ability to play make-believe.  Use that connection!  As you add detail to your character in response to quiz questions, remember to be as detailed as possible.  One of the questions I had for Colline was "what is the worst thing that has ever happened to you?"  Don't just say "my mom died when I was 5" and leave it at that!  Close your eyes and actually build that memory.  Imagine a specific place.  "Remember" the feeling of her hospital sheets.  How did she die? What color was her pillow?  The more detailed this fake memory becomes, the more realistic your character will be.  

This is where we start to get interesting.  Since there's no possible way that Colline's mom tragedy will come up during the opera; how is anyone in the audience going to know about it? They don't know about it,and they do on some level.  The audience won't be able to tell you about Colline's mom's pink pillow after the show, but they will get a sense of a REAL person, with REAL reactions on the stage.  If watching Mimi die (SPOILER ALERT! lol) makes Colline remember his mother, and you have that much detail in the memory, the audience will see you processing something quite complex and emotional.  Your responses will be specific, and your thoughts - as they read them on your face - will be clear.

I don't want to get into specific acting technique, but it's difficult to explain the importance of specificity in background work without it.  In fact, I'm just going to cut off here for now, to avoid hitting specific technical issues.  Next part: walking like an idiot!  Stay tuned!

Today, we start a seminar - Campbell's (almost) completely amateur guide to building characters. When I started performing, I had no idea what I was doing.  (to a certain extent, I still feel that way)  But at the time, I felt particularly useless when I was handed a role to prepare.  What was I supposed to do?  Learn the notes, I guess.  But how?  How does a role go from a bunch of dots on a music staff to a living, breathing character in your body?

I may not be the greatest actor in the world, but I'm not the worst either; and I've been doing this for long enough to have some advice to lay on people.  At the very least, I figure I can learn a lot from people's comments.

Disclaimer - only a few times in my life so far have I actually arrived at the first rehearsal with my role well and truly completely prepared. This is completely typical of a young singer, and something I consider an ugly problem.  I'm working to make the sort of preparation described in this "seminar" habitual.  I write with the greatest possible humility - I hope to use it to kick my own ass, as much as anything else.

Part 1 - Thinking big picture, and the score

The best way to start any big project - and make no mistake, preparing a role is a big project - is to decide on your goal.  What are the conditions for success?  What constitutes a well prepared role?  For me, I have successfully prepared when I walk into the first rehearsal ready to go onstage that night, if the director can give me the staging fast enough.  That means: music learned to the point where it is instinctive, a character I can don at a moment's notice, including mannerisms, walk, and a different way of thinking of the world.  It means knowing what comes next well enough that I don't have to think about it, and feeling what the character wants to do well enough that I could improvise my way through a role.

So we must learn the music, and learn the character very thoroughly indeed.  This process is a slow one.  If at all possible, start months in advance.  The more time you give a character, the better this will serve you.  Because this is about character building, I'm going to leave the musical aspects alone... Maybe I'll write about those another time.  For now, what does the score have to offer your character?

The first step to your character is to simply read the score like a book.  If it's in a foreign language, get out a dictionary.  If you want a fast way to work through scenes you're not in, by all means use a Nico Castel translation.  But for scenes in which you are directly involved, there is simply no substitute for translating every word yourself.  I know it's a pain in the ass, and worse if you're a wordy character like Figaro, but it really is essential.  When you speak English, you know what every word means, and all the implications of that word, and the ebb and flow of your speaking is dependent on this knowledge.  

Take a very short example from the Catalog Aria from Don Giovanni.  Leporello sings "ma in Italia..." with a wonderful high note on the first word.  If all you know is that this means "but in Italy", and you don't know which word is which, the phrase becomes meaningless.  Which word got the high note?  Was it "but in ITALY"?  or "but IN Italy"?   Thanks to the fantastically simple example I chose, we all know that it was "BUT in Italy".  The meaning of the sentence hinges on you knowing every word, even in this totally idiotically straightforward example.  In a more complicated sentence, especially in the sort of poetic language often used in arias, translating by hand with a dictionary is the difference between night and day.

So you're reading the score in the original language.  You should also be taking notes at this point, preferably on paper, about everything you learn about your character in this process.  If someone else calls you a lazy jackass, you should know about it!  Keep all this information stored away for future reference.

 I shouldn't have to say this, but I'm going to just in case: the translation in the score is not good enough!  They are almost always terrible mangled versions of the original meaning.

If you do the translation yourself, you will hopefully remember exactly what other characters are saying to you, as well as what you say to them.  Listening onstage is an important skill to cultivate.  Your character can't just stand in place and wait for his turn to speak!  He should actively listen and see what's going on around him, and respond. 

Again, word for word understanding is important.  In Rigoletto, Maddalena proposes to Sparafucile that he kill the jester and take the money, rather than fulfilling his bargain.  Sparafucile is furious at her for the idea.  But when in her long musical line does he realize what she's proposing? It's not realistic to suddenly get angry at the end of her page of music, it really has to be in response to something specific.  If you translate the score yourself, you will figure out that it is only really obvious about halfway through Maddalena's line, when she actually says "uccidere" (to kill, slay, do in, murder).  That is the kick off point for Sparafucile's anger - well before his line.

Interestingly enough, you will often find that the music reflects this amount of text specificity as well. In Boheme for instance, just because a character enters onstage doesn't mean that the music reflects it.  The music "notices" when the characters do - something you can only discover when you know every word that is being said.

The last part is so straightforward that it hardly bears repeating: now that you understand the textual content of the score through and through, listen to the music.  Get as many recordings as you can muster, and pay attention to what the music seems to say about your characters' relationship to everyone else. This is not as subjective as it seems!   Trust your ear, and your instincts.

So much for characterization from the score.  At this point, you probably have a reasonable sketch of your character.  This is all subject to complete change and reversal in later steps, but for now it's a good base.  Part II will deal with external sources - books, plays, and acting like a 5 year old. 

I'm working on a scene right now, that's all about the buildup of incredible sexual tension between myself and one of my colleagues.  That is to say, a very good looking colleague.  And you know what?  I get completely awkward and uncomfortable when we try and rehearse.  I don't know if it's the fact that she's attractive, or maybe just some discomfort with romance outside my marriage that's in the way.  I know I never used to have trouble with the former... but then, it's been a few years since I've been in any kind of intimate situation with a good looking woman (who is not Bryn)!

I don't have much to base any of this on, since I've never done any kind of love scene before.  I've had (simulated) sex onstage, but it's different when there's supposed to be real chemistry involved.  So there we are, building tension and making the scene work, and a thousand different voices in my head are telling me to get out of the situation.  All that stuff that makes me a good husband, it turns out, turns me into a terrible stage lover!

For now, my response is to try and use the discomfort.  It's a genuine emotion, so if I build it into the character it will be working FOR me.  But I really have to figure out how to get past this issue - eventually, I'm sure I will have some kind of love scene where I don't want to be an awkward putz!  

So the question for the day is, how do you all do it?  When you're called to have a stage kiss, or very passionate, physical stage behavior in general, how do you get past your mental blocks?  Is it just a question of repetition and physical comfort with the person, or what?   

Last week we started rehearsals for Giulio Cesare, with Miami University.  I don't remember if I've posted about this before, so I should give a little backgrounder.

Bryn and I have talked for a long time about the idea of "making your own opportunities".  Basically, since work is hard to come by and so valuable at this stage of an operatic career, it's very useful to be able to create your own performance opportunities; ie by producing an opera yourself.  This has been something I've considered doing for some time now, but magically the "bass advantage" has kept me busy enough that it hasn't been necessary.  For sopranos of course, it's a whole different story.

So Bryn took it upon herself to put together a production this year.  Miami University doesn't do a spring opera (turns out this year is a semi-exception, but that's another story), so she knew many of the singers there would be available - and of course, she would never want for a bass!   Together with one of her closest friends (who was looking for a role to prepare for her own graduate work), Bryn spent months putting together a production of Handel's Giulio Cesare.

It is a fully staged production with chamber orchestra, directed by Bryn's teacher, Alison Acord.  Roles are played by our colleagues at Miami, and of course, by your humble blogger.  It goes  up at the Oxford Art Gallery on April 21st of this year.

All this to explain that we started rehearsal last week, and I've been learning ever more about ancient Egyptian history.  I play Ptolomy XIII (Theos Philopator), Cleopatra's younger brother, her husband, and king of Egypt.  This character is, at the time of the opera, about 15 years old, historically.  This presents me with some new challenges.

As a bass, 99% of the characters you have to play are older men.   The youngest in the popular repertoire is definitely Colline - who is my age, at youngest.  Consequently, I've spent plenty of time learning how to act "old".  Your center of gravity shifts, you have a different style of motion, you don't move as much, in fact.  Character traits for old people can be things like a tremor, a limp... things that definitely don't work with a younger character.

So here I am, throwing out all those old physicalizations to find new ones.  Some things are easy -your center of gravity for instance, is much further forward as a young man than as an old one.  I get to fidget with this role, but I have yet to decide how.  One thing I like to do is to find small characteristic 'tics' for a role.  These tics can be directly associated with the character's position in the show (Sparafucile the assassin absent-mindedly fidgeting with his knife), or they can be personality-based (high priest Sarastro breathing through his nostrils when he's trying to keep his control).  These things can act as anchor points for the audience - a visible reinforcement of who this person is.

 But what do I do for a young man?  A young, brat king, what's more?  I'm still working on it... will keep you all posted!

Today we finished an... interesting unit in our Opera Characterization class - the Extreme Aria Project.  Each class member chose an aria with which they were very comfortable, and then we went down the list, setting each aria to an extreme, eurotrash worthy staging.

An example was a "Caro Nome", about a vampire victim who ends up giving herself to the vampire willingly, and dying onstage.  Or today, "O Mio Babbino Caro", about a father-daughter incest case, where the daughter spent the aria deciding whether to end it by killing herself, or her dad.  It sounds nuts, I know - but it brought up a lot of interesting issues, technically and dramatically.  We ended up spending an hour as a class working on "dying slowly, in agony, to music".  It's something you have to deal with a lot as an operatic actor!  On Monday, we took an hour to work on over-schmaltzy, "running into each other's arms" scenes.  

Somehow, you have to make this stuff compelling to an audience.  There has to be enough reality behind these extreme stagings and characterizations to keep an audience on the edge of their seats.  It's easier to work on that skill with high stakes, bizarro concepts than it is with more pedestrian ideas.  Now, I guess the trick is to apply it all to "regular" acting...

After that last post about how hard comedy is for me, I can honestly say that I've grown.  That post came out of working on a scene from Abduction from the Seraglio for Opera Characterization (acting) class... I found it so hard to be funny while coming from an honest place for the angry, blustering character of Osmin... well, I had a bit of a breakthrough today in class.

Today I actually managed to commit myself totally to the character, as a real human being who is almost apoplectic with rage... and somehow, magically, it was funny.  I didn't even notice it the first time, but apparently the audience laughed!  Shocking.  Anyways, I'm excited now.  I think I touched a whole new kind of honesty in my acting today, and I'm thrilled to get to explore and flex those new muscles.

<rant>

Comedy is way harder than drama.  I've always found a very natural timing and comfort with comic roles, but the problem comes when I try to actually act in them.  Shocking, but apparently it's possible to have an over-the-top, comic character come from an authentic place inside you.  I would never have known, but for our Opera Characterization class, where I have to do exactly that.  I've been watching my colleagues try it for a month now, and though I can see the positive result, I'm having a helluva time getting it myself.

It's one thing to play a straight man in comedy.  That can be authentic.  But the silly man?  How can you make a caricature like Osmin into an authentic character?

</rant>

Sorry, had to get that off my chest.  Anyone with suggestions on realism in comic characters, please post a comment! 

Time for me to join the fray on this one.  If you haven't heard about this story yet, go and watch the two most uncomfortable Youtube videos of all time:

[WARNING: This is seriously offensive stuff.]

Clip 1(Michael Richards' racist explosion)

Clip 2 (Michael Richards' apology on the Tonight Show)

I don't know where he was performing when he did this, but he's lucky it wasn't Cincinnati.  He would have been shot. On stage.

People are raging all over the internet about this, and rightfully so.  Pledges to boycott the Seinfeld series abound, along with more angry commentary than this blogger cares to read.  I cannot condemn that anger, and actions like a boycott are reasonable and appropriate.  I will not be joining the furious mob however.

When I watched those videos, I did not see a man baring his racist heart.  I saw a performer who uses improvisation, extremely high energy, and offensive remarks as a part of his act, who lost control.  In the age of 'Borat', 'the Aristocrats', and 'Jackass' this humor is not new territory or subject to debate.  Given the energy levels and the improvisational nature of his set, that is a volatile situation to begin with.  Many of us have seen comedians "lose it" in an act like that, and completely lose their audience. 

In this instance Michael Richards lost it, and in the process picked on a group of hecklers in the audience.  He hit them with over the top, racial jokes that flopped, and only made the situation worse.  Now no one was laughing, AND the hecklers were angry - and Richards (as he puts it on Letterman) "flew into a rage."

Have you ever been "in a rage"?  I mean so furious that you are completely beyond your own control?  Where you are blindly defensive - and offensive - about something you would normally never defend?  If you're defending "the Aristocrats", you will scream and yell about the appropriateness of <insert heinous sexual act here>.  If you're defending a racial joke - well we saw what happens.

Like it or not, we are all capable of terrible acts like this one, just as we're all capable of murder, given the right (or wrong) circumstances.  Perhaps this is a perspective unique to acting,  since on the stage you have to be aware of those terrible dark corners of the psyche.  Often you have to use them, and even in the controlled environment of the stage that is a frightening process.  I cannot imagine ever using that in an improvised act.  

In that Letterman appearance, I see a man who is utterly shattered by his own actions.  If you have ever lost control and damaged your life and those around you that way, you would recognize that face.  Talk to someone who's been at fault in a major or fatal car accident.   It takes days and months of serious introspection - and often years of therapy - to come to terms with that kind of action.  Imagine having that dark place in your psyche that is capable of such terrible actions take over, and maybe you can understand the fear and shock that Richards must be going through.  I know that feeling, because I remember it from an episode in my own life.  

This does not mean that I dismiss the seriousness of his actions.  It is, as I said, right for people to be angry, to boycott his work, and to feel such great indignation.  Mr. Richards seems to be extremely apologetic, but is taking the lashback as his due for his own actions, which is also right.  Personally, I understand that an individual episode like this does not necessarily define a man.  As a viewer, I am willing to give Mr. Richards the opportunity to regain my respect.  But it will take time, and I would not expect most people to be so forgiving of such an awful tirade.