Reflections on Media
It took a nudge from my friend Gary Lizardo—a much-experienced stage actor and singer—to make it happen: I created a Media page, which I completed after diving into a box of old photos.
Funny that. Most of my photos were taken before the advent of the iPhone, which was new to me in 2010-11—the end of my tenure at NYCO. I started snapping production photos with it, both on and off stage. Well, sort of. I didn’t snap photos during a performance but did after the curtain came down and in rehearsal, my iPhone 4 taking really good photos (a tech guy at the Apple Store told me why once—something about pixel-to-camera lens ratio).
When I look at them now, my New York City Opera photos make me remember…
I had fun camping it up in drag for Wonderful Town for the single purpose of getting a laugh while singing “There are interesting people here on Christopher Street” in the first scene, mugging for the camera backstage, looking fierce in Verdi’s Attila in a fantastic wig and costume. (The smoke machine for that show wasn’t fun since it used a petroleum-based product that was extremely irritating and was banned after it was found to be a carcinogen.)
NYCO was a family full of amazing talent. I see myself standing between dressers David and Paul in a black-and-white photo and remember David—an actor who became a close friend and died of glioblastoma in 2005—cooking up a sitcom called The Fourth Floor, which consisted of backstage shenanigans and witty repartee, actors, and singers entering and leaving in fabulous costumes, and ending with an onstage production number. Of course, that’s what our lives were like. You don’t get into show business without a lot of “show.”
Singing is serious fun. Learning Schoenberg’s Moses und Aron, Wallace’s Harvey Milk, or Janáček’s From the House of the Dead takes a lot of work. While my black-and-white photo of seven preening drag queens in Harvey Milk makes it seem like it was all fun and games, what you can’t see is the anxiety on our faces when we had to yell in voice-rending-unison “Out of the bars and into the streets!” on a high D over and over and over. The director wanted a sound that bled, and boy, did we ever. But we made it work. And that’s the thing: you must find a way to sing the score without hurting yourself and simultaneously deliver a believable performance.
My technique got better over time. I just never gave up, nor did it occur to me to “phone it in.” I’ve always been on a learning curve and often tell myself that my students pay me to learn and give back to them. As such, going to the library wasn’t an academic exercise. I went to find useful information.
Speaking of which: If you haven’t found them already, go to my download page and read Vincenzo Cirillo’s A Lecture on the Art of Singing (1882), Holtzem’s Bases de L'Art du Chant (1863), and Zay’s Practical Psychology of Voice and of Life (1917). What do they have in common? Concepts and procedures rooted in Italian tonal values. Use them consistently, and you can find your way.
Don’t have time to go that deep right now? No worries. Go easy, be my guest, and visit my Media page.
