When you have a program with a bunch of duets, and you also have a director on duty, Day 2 is going to be Stage the Duets Day. A solo song doesn’t usually need a lot of movement, and both of the guys have already done some prep work on their material before they landed on the North Fork—though Adriana only joined us 5 days ago. But if the ensemble stuff is going to look sharp and clean on Sunday, it needs blocking and routining early—even on our small Orient platform stage.

We have a term—“‘ography”—for steps that remain shy of actual dance. We don’t have space for real choreography, and we’ve been made aware that our top-of-the-line platforms, while not actively noisy, do make some sound when people move around on them.  Why use platforms? Well, we’re playing on the same floor as the audience, and we need to give the singers a bit of a lift so that they can be seen by everyone in the hall. We get the risers tomorrow morning, and we hope that they don’t sound like the IRT when the cast executes their moves. Our tech guy, Doug Gray, assured us that they wouldn’t. Nor did he assure us that they’d be quiet as a cat burglar. 

On days like this I am kind of a rehearsal pianist, playing the tunes over and over again as they get staged and repeated. Of course, I am in rehearsal too as I get ready to play the show on Sunday. I have finally learned to use the repetition to work out some of my own technical stuff, rather than sinking into sloppiness. A show like this means playing a lot of orchestral reductions—piano scores that collapse all the notes of an orchestra into something 10 fingers can play. That doesn’t guarantee that the piano-vocal, as it’s called, is something to be taken literally. It tends to include too many inner voices, unnecessary left-hand leaps, and strenuous, thick chords in the right hand. It’s like coffee that’s been left on the burner too long— in need of some dilution for the original light spirit to emerge.

So I spent the day wrestling with the piano, reconciling myself to my own rewritten arrangements that used fewer notes but had far more joie de vivre, as I did a bit of coaching and cued the singers when they missed a lyric. The main issue is language. Normal classical singing emphasizes long vowels and sustained legato lines that make shapely arcs—the bel canto ideal. But much of our material depends on diction that is clipped. And it appears I can be a complete maniac about vowels that are too long, especially in the British material. A simple word like “end” would usually be sung as “e-e-e-e-nd,” but in this type of material it needs to be more like “ennnnd.” 

My inner Maggie Smith emerged fairly often today during our work on the Gilbert and Sullivan scene from Iolanthe. Because I have known it since I was a little boy, and have also programmed it several times in recent years, I have a terrifyingly specific idea of how this scene should go. Unlike many of my colleagues, I am generally undoctrinaire about classical music, and am happy to hear a Schubert song or a Dvorak symphony at a variety of tempos with a range of interpretive ideas, if convincingly executed. I may have my own preferences but I am open to others.  

About G&S, though, I am much more rigid. This, of course, embarrasses me. I am not usually the type of coach who dictates to his colleagues exactly how something needs to be done…with this odd exception. “Add a sharp intake of breath before you say your first line, sweetheart…no, more and louder.…then wait one second before you speak…” “Would you mind pausing in the middle of that line?” “The word ‘all’ has a dark ‘aw’ sound, but the word ‘aunt’ is just dark ‘ah.’” “The ‘l’s’ are forward, like a valley girl saying the word ‘milk.’” 

A flubbed vowel in the French? I’ll do my best to correct it. A screwed-up consonant in the German? Fixed with a smile. A flubbed phoneme in the British stuff? Apoplexy. Philip Stoddard and Adriana Stepien were very patient with me today—this is a side of me they don’t often see, Steve-the-Control-Freak. Katherine, the actual director, also indulged me as I hammered the short dialogue from Gilbert and Sullivan’s “Iolanthe” into shape. 

I am gaining an appreciation for the unique demands of an operetta program. Of course each piece needs to be grounded in a fundamental reality: what does the character want, why do they need to sing these words and this music, what is the core event of the piece? That is the baseline. But moving from the narcissism of Viennese operetta to the haunted bitterness of Piazzolla’s Argentina to the arrant voluptuousness of French culture—not to mention the brittle wit of Victorian England with its powerful but extremely sublimated sexuality—demands a command of style, different kinds of physicality, expertise with the colloquial language of six countries, and a whole lot of panache. It might be “light opera,” but it is a stern mistress—and mostly unfamiliar territory for the current generation of singers.