Desigining Wigs and Makeup for Kiss Me, Kate

Anne Ford Coates: Wig and Makeup Designer

The cast and crew of Kiss Me, Kate had their first dress rehearsal onstage last night and it was thrilling to see the myriad of elements from costumes to lighting come together as the creative team continued to refine their vision for the production. I had a chance to speak with Wig and Makeup Designer Anne Ford Coates to get her insight on the process for creating the styles for Kiss Me, Kate:

When designing any show, you are trying to create a world. With Kiss Me, Kate there is a show within the show so we actually have to create two worlds. Because we see these characters both in their onstage and offstage lives, we’re trying to create a visual connection between the two. This is tricky because the looks of the two periods are vastly different. The offstage world is the modern day of 2008, while the onstage one needs to be a stylized Elizabethan look and have a heightened theatricality to it. Modern shows are very challenging; in fact they are harder than more ornate-looking period shows.

When you’re designing a modern show there are so many visual archetypes that the audience has in their daily media-saturated lives, ranging from pop singers to movie stars to politicians. The slightest styling choice can have an unintended meaning. On the other hand, when you’re doing an 18th century style, the audience knows there will be big white wigs, but it won’t really effect their perception if you choose to have a wig curl one way instead of another. So with a modern show everything has to be scrutinized on a much higher level to make sure the audience stays within the world we’ve created and isn’t reminded of Justin Timberlake or George Bush unless that’s what we want.

On top of the challenge of creating modern looks, we need to be able to change quickly between that and the theatrical “onstage” look. If there weren’t so many quick changes between modern and period, we could probably use most of the cast’s own hair. However, because this is Glimmerglass and the theater isn’t exactly climate controlled, that isn’t an option. If an actor leaves the stage in their period wig and needs to be back on in two minutes in their modern look, you can’t just rip the wig off and have them shake their hair out and look fabulous. There is no such thing as a Charlie’s Angels shaking-your-hair-out-of-the-helmet moment! Because of this many of the actors will be in wigs that look like their actual hair. We have made a choice, and we’ll see how this goes, that perhaps for "Too Darn Hot" everyone should be their sweaty pinned-up-hair selves because it’s too darn hot! There is something about that that really tells the story well.

Because of the all of the quick changes, we haven’t finalized the make-up designs for the show yet. It would be great to do some really over-the-top theatrical makeup for the “onstage” looks, but it may not be feasible to get it on and off quickly. At the moment we’re waiting to hear back from stage management about the timings of the quick changes so that we can make our final decisions on how to create the two different looks. There are, of course, some people who have plenty of time for long make-up changes but we’re trying to create a consistent world so the “onstage” makeup can only go as far as the shortest quick-change allows.

photo:
1. Anne Ford Coates works on Lisa Vroman's [Kate/Lilli Vanessi] makeup before an onstage tech rehearsal. photo credit: Michael Manning

Keeping Score with Bellini

There’s nothing simple about producing opera. Singers to cast, costumes and sets to design and build, performances to rehearse — and of course, there’s the question of the score. While one might assume the music is the one “given” in any opera production, that’s far from the case.

When David Angus was hired to conduct I Capuleti e i Montecchi, he immediately contacted Elizabeth Cusato, Glimmerglass Opera’s orchestra librarian, to learn what editions were available. Angus was thrilled to learn of a facsimile of Bellini’s manuscript. However, given the frantic pace of opera production in those days — not to mention the fact that the composer was usually on hand to lead the musicians through the score — manuscripts tend to be incomplete, filled with shorthand and inconsistencies, and sometimes illegible.

For all its problems, the manuscript proved an essential guide to Bellini’s intentions. According to Angus, the edition that has become “standard” for modern performances of Capuleti is the work of a later editor who “decided that Bellini didn’t really mean what he wrote. The editor totally rewrote it to sound like Wagner. It is full of fat brass chords and woodwind doubling. Any chord that had three notes in the original now has six. There is no way you would hear the singers over that orchestra unless they had Wagnerian voices. And the parts that come with the score are tenth-generation photocopies — you can barely work out the lines and notes.”

So Angus began the laborious process of checking the now-standard edition against the manuscript facsimile. “I started with the standard score — listening, studying, checking against the facsimile, marking all of that into the score. Then I went to the orchestral parts, inking what was not clear, removing the slurs and wrong dynamics.” In all, he spent about four months of focused work on the project before sending the score to cast members.

The cast for I Capuleti e i Montecchi arrived this week. As with the other shows, they began their time together with music rehearsals, working with Angus, to complete the “composition” of the performing score — in bel canto opera, the printed page, no matter how carefully researched, is not the end of the story. Singers are expected to add a certain amount of ornamentation to the vocal line, not only to show off their beautiful singing, but also to heighten the expressive impact of Bellini’s melodies. “What I’ve said to the singers is turn up with whatever you like, as long as it fits into the basic rhythm,” says Angus. “I quite like embellishment, provided it doesn’t interrupt. It has to make emotional sense. Nothing can be just for show.”

photo credit:

1. an etching of the youthful Bellini. photo credit: p.d. artist, anonymous

Take Me Out to the Opera!

With its season preparations in full swing, members of the Glimmerglass Opera staff made time on June 16 to march in the 2008 Baseball Hall of Fame Game Parade down Main Street in Cooperstown. Opera and baseball intertwined in Cooperstown as Glimmerglass’s parade marchers sang “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” while wearing shirts and jerseys to show support for their favorite teams. The parade was part of the festivities leading up to the final National Baseball Hall of Fame Game at historic Doubleday Field. Glimmerglass joined groups from throughout the community in marking this historic occasion. Look for photos coming soon from Glimmerglass Opera’s participation in the Springfield 4th of July Parade!

photos:

1. Glimmerglass staff carry the Glimmerglass Opera banner in the Hall of Fame Game Parade. photo credit: Michael Manning

2. Glimmerglass staff hand out coupons and candy to parade attendants. photo credit: Michael Manning

3. The Glimmerglass marchers make their way down Main Street where over 4,000 watched the parade. photo credit: Michael Manning

Keeping Score with Kiss Me, Kate

Today conductor David Charles Abell began rehearsing with the orchestra that will accompany Kiss Me, Kate. The Glimmerglass production will feature the original orchestrations of Robert Russell Bennett, who recently won a posthumous Tony for his tremendous achievements.

The complete original orchestration has not been heard for many years. According to Abell, “At the time on Broadway, the orchestration was considered disposable, like the sets and costumes. Once the original production was over, the score and parts would be dumped, or put away in some archive somewhere and forgotten. I have done a lot of musicals over the years, and it has always frustrated me that it is so difficult to get hold of the orchestral score.” In the golden age of American musical theater, there was a constant pressure to create new work — and not a lot of interest in preserving the details of shows that had closed. (The 1948-1949 Broadway season saw the birth of Kiss, Me Kate and South Pacific, along with new works by Kurt Weill, Frank Loesser, Sigmund Romberg and many others — as well as the American professional premiere of Britten’s The Rape of Lucretia at the Ziegfield!)

Today's conductors are forced to rely on annotated piano/vocal scores for revivals of musicals, leading a band playing from parts that have their own problems: “Over the years, publishers would recopy the parts, but they were copying parts that had already been used in the pit,” says Abell. “So if a conductor said, ‘Make it short,’ one player might add a dot, one might add an accent, another might write ‘shorter.’ These markings made sense to that group of players, but once the parts were sent to a new group, no one was on the same page.” The parts were also reconfigured along the way for various touring ensembles, and without the full orchestral score, conductors had no road map.

Abell was lucky: “I got hold of the lawyer for the Cole Porter estate — they have offices in midtown Manhattan — and asked if I could take a look at what they had. I went in, and sure enough, on one of the shelves was a manuscript for Kiss Me, Kate. I recognized immediately the handwriting of Robert Russell Bennett, one of the greatest orchestrators of musical theater.” While Bennett was the primary orchestrator, it was standard practice for the workload to be shared among colleagues; in the score that Abell found, Don Walker had contributed the backing for the tarantella numbers, including “Where is the life that late I led?” The orchestration is very innovative for its time, with five saxophones and a featured guitar part.

“I spent a lot of my time comparing orchestra parts with the score,” he says. “This score is so modern — all that hot jazz stuff. Robert Russell Bennett really created that sound. These old orchestrations have a real integrity.”

photo:

1. Conductor David Charles Abell (second from right) showing the full score for Kiss Me, Kate at the Produciton Seminar. photo credit: Michael Manning

Setting the Stage for I Capuleti e i Montecchi

On June 2, the casts for Giulio Cesare in Egitto and Kiss Me, Kate arrived and began rehearsal. Two weeks later, the team for the American fully staged premiere of Wagner’s Das Liebesverbot arrived in Cooperstown. Today, we welcomed the final group of artists — those involved with Bellini's I Capuleti e i Montecchi — to the mix. The cast are all Glimmerglass veterans, and most of them are alumni of the Young American Artists Program: Sarah Coburn , Sandra Piques Eddy, Christopher Job, and Soon young Park. They are joined by Canadian tenor John Tessier, whose recent Glimmerglass roles include Almaviva in Il Barbiere di Siviglia and Ferrando in Così Fan Tutte.

The production will mark the Glimmerglass debut of acclaimed director Anne Bogart. As with the other productions in the 2008 Festival Season, Capuleti will be staged on a set by John Conklin that evokes an Elizabethan theater. Earlier this spring, I had a chance to discuss the show with Anne and learn more about her plans for using the space.

Q. How will you approach the set and the space that John has designed?

A. The most important thing for me in both theater and opera is that the audience’s imagination is provided space to create. It is for this reason that I believe in ideogramic staging and settings. What is the very least that we impose that might allow the audience to dream? With the Bellini opera I want the space to feel luscious, inviting, mysterious and like an open playing field. Imagine the original story of the Capulet and the Montague conflict, or perhaps the Jets and the Sharks. Two teams, two tribes, two gangs, meet one another in the middle of the night on an open playing field. Their disagreement is interrupted by an exceptionally poignant love story.

Q. On a practical level, the size and shape of a space affect how performers move within it. Are there other ways in which you expect the architectural language of this particular set to affect how people work in it?

A. I want to make sure that the space is unencumbered, uncluttered, elegant and spacious, both vertically and horizontally. I want to draw imagery from the bodies and voices of the singers, their movement and their stillness.

Q. Even if set were unchanged for all four performances, I imagine it would look very different depending on the music being played. How does Bellini's musical language affect how you see and move in the space? This music is not as formal as Handel's, but we are still faced with long sections where the action stops while we revel in a single affect ...and lots of vocal fireworks. How do you, as a director, deal with the dramaturgy of a bel canto opera for an action-oriented 21st-century audience? How does this particular set inform your treatment of the extended sings in this piece?

A. In the drawn-out moments I am inspired by Shakespeare’s notion of soliloquy. Think of soliloquy and aria as the same idea. The story pauses and we enter into an interior emotional space. How that space different from the storytelling of the action? These action-stop close-ups allow for the movement to be more poetic, more dream-like, and less pedestrian.

Q. Your main body of work has been developed with SITI Company, a group of artists who share a specific and ongoing training. To what extent do you bring techniques of Suzuki and/or Viewpoints into your work with non-SITI folk? Are there elements/ideas that are most useful when you are building a company from scratch for a production? For THIS production?

A. Both the Suzuki and the Viewpoints training, which indeed my company does on a daily basis and teaches around the world, are a way for actors to practice the art of stage presence, flexibility, focus, clarity and spontaneity, both physically and vocally. But all performers, no matter what their training, are struggling with these issues on a daily basis. It is not necessary to do the Viewpoints or Suzuki to grapple with them. Any good training asks for the same effort. For that reason, we are definitely not starting from scratch. We all start from where we are at in the development of our techniques and philosophies.

Q. Although some elements of the set will change from production to production, I imagine some of the most drastic visual transformations may happen via lighting. It's probably a bit early to talk about this in detail — since so much it will develop in tech — but have you had any preliminary conversations about the use of light in this production?

A. I have worked with Chris Akerlind on many occasions. He is an extraordinary collaborator and a terrifically gifted lighting designer. But the best collaborations are not about talking or discussing or concepts or ideas. Lighting is an art that incorporates time, space, tempo, duration, intensity, shape, focus, architecture and movement. Chris responds to what we do with the staging and the story and he brings his own point of view. I do not try to predetermine what he is going to do. Collaboration is an act of trust and belief and respect for those with whom one is collaboration.

Q. Your configuration of the Globe-inspired space is asymmetrical. Are there particular benefits and/or challenges of working in a space that is off-balance? To what extent might you work with the other artists to either balance the architecture and/or revel in the imbalance?

A. Balance and imbalance is the noble secret of any artistic enterprise. A great singer or actor or painter or musician or architect allows him/herself to go off balance in order to welcome the struggle to regain the harmony of balance. This is the artistic leap. So, in choosing the imbalance of the architecture in John Conklin’s arrangement of the space, we will be forced to struggle constantly to find the harmony and balance of the space. And this is a good thing! The world of I Capuleti e i Montecchi is a world significantly off balance. Falling in love, a central action in the opera, is the act of falling out of balance. We hope that the world can right itself. Those who manage to find the harmony of balance from a state of imbalance are heroes.

photo credit:

1. Stage ops working on John Conklin's set, which will be used in all four productions this summer. photo credit: John Glover

The Concept for Kiss Me, Kate

Diane Paulus: Director, Kiss Me, Kate

By staging the very first musical in Glimmerglass Opera’s history, director Diane Paulus was given a very unique challenge. Below are her thoughts on Kiss Me, Kate and her concept for the production.

As a director I’m always interested in the larger context of a performance. What I found really exciting about this Kiss Me, Kate was that we were not doing it “on Broadway,” we’re doing it at Glimmerglass. I thought it would be a big mistake, as did Michael MacLeod [General & Artistic Director], to try to compete with a Broadway revival of the musical instead we embraced the fact that this is the Glimmerglass Opera Festival staging the work.
The show Kiss Me, Kate is a play within a play. We see the backstage lives and bickering of these characters as well as the musical version of Taming of the Shrew that they are producing. I thought that it would be interesting to say that the offstage life is actually the Glimmerglass Opera Theater in 2008. Instead of seeing backstage at a Broadway house the audience will see the backstage of the festival. This includes every aspect of Glimmerglass: the Young Artists preparing for other shows, the fantastic crew, the setting of Cooperstown, and all of the other energy and excitement that comes along with creating a summer opera festival.
This idea works brilliantly with John’s set, which is a beautiful evocation of Shakespeare’s Globe Theater. I loved the idea that all of the shows this season would be connected by sharing this one set. This shared space added another level to the concept that our Kiss Me, Kate is being done at Glimmerglass. The fact that the set is an evocation of a theater also helped us create the contrast between the backstage world and the play-within-the-play. I think the result is a very compelling way of addressing the challenge of what it means to do a musical at an opera festival.

photo credit:
1. Diane Paulus (center) speaking about her concept at the Production Seminar for Kiss Me, Kate. photo credit: Michael Manning.

Why Shakespeare? Programming the 2008 Season

Michael MacLeod, General & Artistic Director

For our first posting, Michael MacLeod provides insight into how the Shakespearean-themed season came to be and how the programming decisions were made.

Following last summer’s Orpheus-inspired season, you may be wondering if we decided to have a Shakespearean season before choosing any of the specific repertoire. The plan for the season actually began with a desire to program Wagner’s early comic opera Das Liebesverbot (inspired by Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure).

The work has an unusual history. It had a disastrous opening. Accounts indicate that it had not been properly rehearsed and that there was fighting between members of the cast just before the second performance (which was attended by all of three people). I believe the reason it failed to “take off” has more to do with its tumultuous debut rather than any inherent weaknesses. It is full of charming music — largely inspired by Bellini and his contemporaries — with echoes of Beethoven and premonitions of the Wagner to come. A number of European houses have mounted productions, and the Wagner Society of New York was party to making the U.S. premiere take place, albeit only in concert, in 1983. Glimmerglass Opera is presenting the first fully-staged performances in America.

So it is around this historic event in American opera that the season was constructed. The task became finding three other works to complement the unknown Wagner offering. If Das Liebesverbot is the beginning of Wagner’s exploration of music and drama, Bellini’s I Capuleti e i Montecchi, drawn from the same Italian story that inspired Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, is a true vehicle for singers. Handel’s Giulio Cesare, while not directly inspired by Shakespeare, is baroque music at its grandest and includes two of the Bard’s most treasured characters: Julius Caesar and Cleopatra. And what better to complement these three than Cole Porter’s Kiss Me, Kate? Brilliantly poking fun of Shakespeare, this musical inclines toward the world of operetta.

You are in for a treat this summer. All of our productions will be on the stage of an Elizabethan theater evoking Shakespeare’s Globe in London, designed by our Associate Artistic Director John Conklin. And what a setting this will be when the full Glimmerglass Orchestra is on stage at “The Globe” giving two performances of Mendelssohn’s complete Incidental Music to A Midsummer Night’s Dream, with linking spoken text from the play.

I hope you enjoy the 2008 season and I look forward to seeing you this summer.

photo credit:

1. Micahel Macleod General & Artistic Director, photo: Claire McAdams

Welcome!

Welcome to the 2008 Glimmerglass Opera Blog! Here you will find behind-the-scenes glimpses into the many facets that come together to create four new productions each summer as well as numerous recitals, master classes, and seminars. The blog will feature interviews with the countless people that arrive each summer to create the season as well as insights into the intersections of Shakespeare and opera. We hope you enjoy this look into the workings of Glimmerglass Opera.