About the 24-Hour Opera Project:
This year’s event took place on January 25 and 26th and featured five teams. On Friday night, composers and lyricists (librettists) were randomly paired and given 12 hours to compose 7-to-10 minute “mini” operas. Each short opera had to incorporate the same theme — “Convincing Confession” — and different randomly selected props.
Early on Saturday morning, a trio comprising a stage director, music director/accompanist and stage manager was assigned to each team and briefly consulted with their composing duo. At 9 a.m., singers began rehearsing.
Saturday’s 7 p.m. performances at the Atlanta Opera Center were also carried via a live webcast. At the conclusion, the Judges Favorite award went “The Puddle of Youth” by the Blue Team. The Audience Favorite award went to the Green Team’s, “Beach and Moan,”with a libretto by William Samuel Bradford of Roswell. (Atlanta Journal-Constitution reporter Jill Vejnoska was one of the judges this year).
To view the webcast of all five mini-operas and other videos, go to www.atlantaopera.org
His was hands-down the most wooden performance of the evening.
And he ended up briefly stealing the Atlanta Opera’s spotlight in classic showbiz fashion.
An overflow crowd was eagerly awaiting the opening notes of one of the five original “mini-operas” debuting during last Saturday’s “24 Hour Opera Project.” The annual event brings together musically gifted strangers to create and perform 10-minute pieces in a competitive team format, with three singers per team. Two highly coveted awards, voted on separately by the audience and a panel of expert judges, were up for grabs.
But now the emcee stepped forward to announce that one of the Blue Team’s singers had to bow out.
Only to be replaced by some no-name plucked from obscurity and … the prop table?
“Early that morning I’d noticed a ventriloquist’s dummy there looking like something out of an old-school horror movie,” director Matthew Ozawa recalled about his rather late-in-the-game decision to substitute a dummy from the Atlanta Opera’s prop closet for the missing singer. “I’d thought ‘How funny would it be if one of the teams had to use it?’”
The joke was nearly on him. From directors and librettists to composers and countertenors, talent from around the country takes part in the “24HOP.” That contributed to this year’s particularly operatic plot twist as weather woes kept Durham-based mezzo-soprano Emily Byrne from arriving in time to join her team.
Faced with having to stage "The Puddle of Youth" — an older female "buddy comedy" by Athens, Ga. composer Natalie Williams and Marietta librettist Vynnie Meli — without one of the buddies, Ozawa considered alternatives ranging from rewriting to, uh, recasting.
“He called me at home and told me he had an idea about using a dummy,” recounted Meli, who’d just come off an overnight writing stint with Williams and was admittedly groggy when the director called. “I couldn’t visualize it. In opera, almost everything is sung.”
Yet at a certain point, she also knew, the 24HOP composer/librettist teams hand off their scores to the director and singers charged with bringing them to life onstage. When Meli and Williams arrived for Saturday night’s performance they watched along with several hundred audience members as that second female “buddy” was portrayed by the tuxedoed male dummy — who’d aquired the name “Howard” during rehearsals.
Actually, he was toted around onstage by Blue Team mezzo-soprano Arsenia Soto, who moved his mouth while speaking most of his lines in a comically nasal tone and singing both parts. And instead of that living female buddy, he became Soto’s character’s dead husband in a dream sequence that retained many of Meli’s clever lines.
“It’s not exactly what we planned, but there’s another sort of magic in that,” said Meli, the 2012 winning librettist as well.
Indeed, the Blue Team bested four other teams to win the Judges Award.
Howard was unavailable for comment, but director Ozawa enthused that the compressed experience “forces you to work intuitively and tests where you are in terms of your skill level.”
That perfectly describes the 24-Hour Opera Project, says Atlanta Opera director of community engagement Emmalee Iden Hackshaw.
Still, some tests just can’t be prepared for.
"I have [a copy of] 'Opera for Dummies' on my bookshelf," Hackshaw laughed. "But there's no chapter on this."
About the Author
