On the first day back from Christmas vacation, overlooked bits of garland still hung along the edge of the Vero Beach High School stage as shop students touched up the set for this Sunday’s performance of Johann Strauss’ operetta “Die Fledermaus.”
The performance by the Vero Beach Operal, which will be given only once, should be about as accessible as opera can get – a modernized 19th century screwball comedy, and sung in English to boot. But for the drama and shop students circulating through the Performing Arts Center this past week, the grand illusion of opera was broken down even further.
In the women’s dressing room, the costume mistress, Paula Andreozzi, applied her seamstress theorems to rectify the geometry of a gown gone askew.
“I love you,” gushed a grateful Christina Suits of Stuart, a soprano in the role of Ida.
The former St. Edward’s Middle School student who went on to train in Chinese medicine now studies with Romanian opera great Virginia Zeani, a long-time friend of Vero Beach Opera.
Suits was a finalist in the last Marcello Giordani Vocal Competition and is slated to study in Sicily this year.
In a backstage studio, home to a table of snacks and thicket of music stands, baritone Tim Renner and soprano Helen Todd stood a few feet apart in their street clothes. On the other side of an upright piano was Bruce Stasyna, now in his second year as musical director of Vero Beach Opera and former chorus master with New York City Opera.
As the leads in “Die Fledermaus”–Eisenstein and his wife, Rosalinde –the pair took direction from Stasyna in a language laced with Italian, half-sung, half-spoken.
“Up but appoggiatura, up but appoggiatura, much more classical,” chanted Stasyna, following a yellowed score.
In the mirrors that lined the studio walls, Renner’s UNC Tarheel-blue T-shirt, buffeted by his breaths, told a story by itself of discipline, training, and probably a lot of missed games.
Todd’s soaring singing voice abruptly shifted into neutral, as she softly asked Stasyna’s permission to take a breath here, change a rhythm there. “Of course, of course,” he said.
Out on the stage, unlit and adorned by the still-evolving set, stage director Russell Franks flew from place to place and part to part, like a cursor on a screen. Blocking the operetta’s action as the actors trailed along, Franks luxuriated on a fainting couch, slunk along a wall, and feigned a lusty embrace of the diva’s knees.
Franks teaches voice at Stetson University, where many of the voices in “Die Fledermaus”’s chorus are currently in training.
They will be joined by select singers from the Vero Beach Choral Society in a revival of a collaboration with Vero Beach Opera.
Along with his blocking antics, Franks showed his practical side. Lighting had not yet been set, he pointed out. By the end of the week, the dark stage would be illuminated by spots. The singers would have to adjust their blocking to stay in the spotlight.
“And watch this arrangement here,” Franks cautioned, pointing to a long trap door that on Sunday would open to become the pit for members of the Brevard Symphony Orchestra. “You wouldn’t want to fall in.”
“Die Fledermaus” has just the one performance Sunday (Jan. 10) at 3 p.m.
Tickets range from $15 to $100 through the Vero Beach Opera website and the high school theater’s box office.
