Comic operas are usually crowd pleasers: finally a break from all the tragic deaths and doomed lovers. The problem is, there aren’t that many to choose from. Opera companies can only program “Così Fan Tutte”, “Il Barbiere di Siviglia” or “L’Elisir d’Amore” and a handful of others so often.
So Francesca Zambello, the artistic and general director of the Glimmerglass Festival, came up with a new idea. “I just said, ‘Let’s do a Rossini comedy that doesn’t exist yet,'” she said in a recent video call.
In other words, a jukebox opera – “Tenor Overboard,” which premieres Tuesday at the festival, in Cooperstown, NY and will last through August 18.
While the jukebox format is common enough on Broadway, it is much rarer in opera houses. Baroque opera lends itself to the genre better than most styles, from the “pasticcio” of yore, which recycled pre-existing works, to “The Enchanted Island” in 2011, a Metropolitan Opera commission in which the librettist Jeremy Sams inserted Handel’s music, Vivaldi, Rameau and others in a plot borrowed from Shakespeare’s plays.
Undaunted by this relative lack, or perhaps stimulated by it, Zambello phoned playwright Ken Ludwig last summer to ask if he was interested in writing the libretto for the project. He was a good candidate in two ways: he wrote the book for “Crazy for You,” the Tony-winning Gershwin jukebox musical, and his most famous play, “Lend Me a Tenor,” is a farce featuring a 1930s opera star. . (His new “Lend Me a Soprano,” which features female lead characters in the same basic plot, opens in September at the Alley Theater in Houston.)
Ludwig, an opera fanatic, took the opportunity to collaborate a bit with Rossini. He decided to put “Tenor Overboard” in the 1940s and stuff it with what he called “the great tropes of comic opera.”
“Often they’re stories of love that can’t be fulfilled because the older generation tries to get in the way of the younger generation’s sexual urges: ‘You can’t marry that boy,'” he said in a video chat. . “I also wanted a storm – they often change the story, like they did in ‘Barber of Seville’ and ‘The Italian Girl in Algiers’.”
Ludwig made up a story about two New York sisters, Gianna (Reilly Nelson) and Mimi (Jasmine Habersham), who tried to escape their domineering father and arranged an arranged marriage for Mimi. They join – in cross-dressing disguise, a narrative device beloved by Shakespeare, opera and screwball comedy – an all-male quartet called the Singing Sicilians on a ship sailing to Sicily. Of course chaos ensues.
“Tenor Overboard” relies more on theatrical dialogue than the usual operatic recitative, so Ludwig’s libretto had to be quite elaborate – and funny. “Rossini gave you moments that clearly land comic because he was such a comedic genius,” Ludwig told the singers. “And I’ve tried to write a libretto that’s comedic in the same way, and in the same way, my plays normally have that sense of rhythm.”
Ludwig also reworked the surtitles accompanying the arias, which are sung in Italian, in an attempt to give some of them “rhyme and rhythm,” as he put it. “Opera surtitles have to convey something to people and you want people to look at the stage,” says Zambello, who directs the production with Brenna Corner, “but these also have a little extra Ludwig humor.”
After agreeing on an overall synopsis, the hardest part was yet to come: it had to be filled with music—which ultimately came from 15 different sources.
“We wanted to be absolutely sure that we weren’t just re-enacting Rossini’s famous arias,” Joseph Colaneri, Glimmerglass’s music director, told Zoom. “Yes, we have the ‘Barbiere’ duet, but we wanted this piece to represent lesser known music by Rossini as well.”
Colaneri became part detective, tracking down obscure versions of obscure operas online and in libraries, and part MacGyver, adapting some vocal scores to make them work in their new context. For example, the lyrics of the “Barbiere” duet, “Dunque io son,” which Colaneri referred to, was slightly modified to make sense of the story. And because Ludwig’s main pair consists of a mezzo and a baritone (a nod to “Dunque io son”), some transposition was required – Rossini tended to combine a tenor and a soprano for the love duets of his comic operas. .
Another challenge was the scene where we introduced the singing Sicilians, whom we first meet at a YMCA – because why not? Colaneri looked at male quartets in Rossini operas, but couldn’t find anything suitable. So he turned his attention to short pieces the composer wrote for “soirées musicales” after he stopped writing operas, and saw the patterlied “La Danza” (recorded by Luciano Pavarotti, among others).
Colaneri had to write a vocal arrangement for two tenors, a baritone and a bass – and more. “It should work again in the second act because two of the men are replaced by the two women disguised as men,” he said. “They sing in the female range, but I designed the piece so that it could work with mixed vocal styles.”
“Some people would say, ‘How can you transpose Rossini?'” Colaneri said. “But Rossini did this himself all the time.”
For Act 2, Colaneri had to find a basso buffo aria for the sisters’ father, Petronio (Stefano de Peppo). Instead of the popular “A un dottor della mia sorte”, from “Il Barbiere”, he chose “Io, Don Profondo” from “Il Viaggio a Reims” (an opera that Rossini himself had collected for parts, some of which he reused in “Le Comte Ory”). “To me, it’s the greatest of these buffo arias,” Colaneri said. “Rossini went a bit over the top with it. We knew we would have Stefano and he would make it.”
Colaneri and his cast also had to deal with the vocal embellishments and embellishments that are part of Rossini’s performance. The conductor suggested the singers listen to Ella Fitzgerald’s live version of “How High the Moon” for an example of masterful improvisation, which he described as “harmonic off the charts”. He also worked closely with them to devise decorations to match their register and roles. “You can’t write decorations for someone until you’ve heard what they can do,” Colaneri said. “You have to figure that out a bit.”
As with most comedies, speed and timing are essential on stage and even off – “Tenor Overboard” hatched in about a year. “Rossini sometimes wrote his operas in a month, so why shouldn’t we?” said Zambello.
Fans need to be sure that they will be laughing at Rossini, not at him. “We try to perform these pieces with all the musical integrity it takes to make them come true,” Colaneri said. “We take it all very seriously musically and give it a twist.”
Still, it’s clear that Zambello wants this work, part of her final season as head of the Glimmerglass Festival (she remains artistic director of the Washington National Opera), to be unabashedly celebratory. “It’s Italy, Sicily, food – things people love.”
When asked if she was willing to embrace Ludwig’s love of farcical jokes and let someone throw a plate of spaghetti for fun, Zambello smiled. “I resist that,” she said. “But I think it will work its way in.”