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Imagine a 200-lb soprano tripping down castle steps while trilling like a canary. Envision a scene from Wagner's Ride of the Valkyries where the cast, while vying for the spotlight, are dressed in tacky ball gowns and wielding spears and boas. If you can picture either of these situations, then you have some idea of what La Gran Scena Opera is about. Burlesque? Definitely, but burlesque is only a part of their story. Even though this all-male company sings in falsettos and falsies, they have an appreciation and an understanding of what makes opera a compelling art form. Combining comedy and the sublime, these divas convulse their audiences with laughter and instill in them a feeling that opera can be loved and laughed at — at the same time.
Company creator and artistic director Ira Siff plays Vera Galup-Borszkh, whose wigs and makeup are reminiscent of Lucille Ball or our own Cherry Tartt and Yolanda. An ageless character with a very long career, Vera is affectionately referred to as La Dementia. Time has described her performance as Bette Midler on Benzedrine. While the humor is ever-present, she has been known to make audiences fall into worshipful hushes at the beauty of the music. Her soprano voice is stratospheric, capable of amazing strength, and has been called ear-splitting by at least one writer.
I recently spoke with Siff about arias, applause, and architecture.
How would you describe what you do?
I do somewhere between a spoof of and a
tribute to grand opera that reflects affectionately, but through a distorted
mirror, what I grew up with when I was a kid living in New York City and going to
the old Metropolitan Opera — a very grand and gilded palazzo, not the cheesy
Lincoln Center.
One of the things I remember from last time I was at Lincoln
Center was the gold leaf falling from the ceiling.
Well, that is the new place.
Who needs it? That was the '60s, the worst period of architecture. Here we are,
stuck with it — the worst kind of nightmare. They were all built at the wrong
time. They managed to take very expensive ingredients, like redwoods from Africa
and precious stone, and make it look like Formica and poured concrete. It's a
mess. It was the period.
When I was a kid the old Met was a dingy-looking place outside, but inside, it was a golden horseshoe on 39th and Broadway. It was quite grand, with a lot of history. I began to go on the instigation of a high school friend, who literally dragged me to sit through a performance that starred a very young Joan Sutherland. I was completely swept away. I had never seen anything so dramatic or funny in my entire life. She was startling. Pandemonium broke loose when she finished. The place just went bananas. This was a time before the now ubiquitous and extremely meaningless standing ovation that greets any performance penned by Andrew Lloyd Weber or even worse. This was a time when people responded for a reason — the reason not being because they just paid $75 for a Broadway show and they'd better pat themselves on the back. They spontaneously responded to performances.
I was immediately taken with the whole thing and switched from going to Broadway to going to the opera; I became something of a lunatic who went several times a week. I could only afford standing room. I made friends in my mind with my favorite divas. I tended to gravitate to Joan Sutherland, who is also a Grand Scena fan. I also became addicted to more dramatic singers with better acting ability. I became a complete Maria Callas maniac; I stood in line for 3 days and nights to get to see her do Tosca — which I got to see twice. It was her final two performances at the Met and almost her final opera anywhere. She was burned; her voice had finally taken a powder.
What is it about opera that appeals to you so much?
If you ever went to something and were immediately
grabbed by it in a way like you were never grabbed by anything else before —
there's not a completely coherent explanation for that. I could say that the art
form has everything that I love: music that I'm very fascinated by; the human
voice; that it's dramatic; that I found divas and divos, but particularly the
divas, to be fascinating sort-of monsters. I could say that the art form is
compelling because of its combination of music and drama.
But frankly, I don't know why it grabbed me. But it did, and did so immediately. It's like going to baseball games but never wanting to go to football games. It really got me and I loved it and still love it, although I find that exciting performances are fewer and farther between. The art form is more generic now, geared more toward product by the media studios.
Because of the need to make money?
Yes, the classical
medium is in terrible, terrible shape; sales are at an all time low. So, the
performances are geared for marketing and producing stars on the level of the
three tenors. God forbid! It's not as much to do with immediacy of the live
performance, even though the art form at this point tends toward much more
involvement with stagecraft than it used to, when singers would walk to the
footlights and put out an arm and sing an aria.Ironically, it is really the
truth that it's a live performance medium. We have all the stagecraft in people,
not the fat people or the rest of it, and it is less exciting than when they
walked out to the footlights, put out an arm and sang an aria.
It's partly because we are chronologically farther away from the original creation of the works; people are not as attuned to performing them as they were when people worked with the composers. People were writing operas of real importance only until the 1920s. After that it's been sparse. You had people that came from a tradition or line of experience that they don't anymore, in the way that Mary Martin or Ethel Merman worked with Broadway composers and really knew the requisites of the singing. Now, Broadway singers sound like radio singers and work with body mikes.
Do you feel that the parody you do is in response to this?
Yes. I do. It's a re-creation of something that I loved. While we really are
funny and give the audience a lot to laugh at and laugh about, we are also
serious, on a certain level, in restoring to opera the kind of live performance
thrill we feel was lost with the naivete of the age gone by.
That's why we see people who come to our show regularly like Jimmy Levine who runs the Met, or Leontyne Price, or Joan Sutherland, divas from that era who think that our singing is really expressive and exciting. They also enjoy our spoof of what they do or used to do.
Some of the reviews I've seen place emphasis on the drag aspect
rather than your music. How do you feel about this?
It's annoying. But there's
nothing much you can do about it.
The most recent reviews don't talk about the drag as much as much as they give away the jokes and the staging gimmicks. Which is fine...whatever. For the big fans that are in music or our regular following in New York, the singing is very important. The singing is partly serious and partly vocal spoof; it's the references that it makes to the traditions that they recognize.
What prompted you to start doing opera in drag?
I had worked a lot in cabaret. I had characters that I did, and occasionally
one of them would throw on a schmatta, but no makeup. I did a parody of a drugged-out
jazz singer for instance, the kind that wore a big muu muu and glasses —
the Ella Fitzgerald look with a Billie Holiday addiction.
All my characters sang and did music of various kinds, but I had seen Charles Ludlam. His biggest success was Camille. He was so funny and dramatic and incredibly faithful to the Dumas play. At the same time, he paid tribute in his performing style to Garbo's films, to Tallulah Bankhead, to great stage actresses; his own style, on top of it, was hilarious but compelling. He could get you to laugh and cry almost simultaneously.
This became my goal. I decided that I would try to work up my falsetto — which my voice teachers had told me was an incredibly dangerous thing to do. I was going to try to do this last act of La Traviata, the death scene, with another fellow who was a fan of my cabaret work. We decided to form this little company to do late night performances for cult audiences in New York City.
We were reviewed in the New York Times rather favorably. Suddenly, people were coming down from the Met with paper bags over their head. It became a secret cult thing. The people who weren't secretive about it were the opera queens, who came quite gleefully. They were our first and most beloved and loyal audience, until a great number of them died. So La Traviata for me has a real connection to our beginning and also to our lost audience. It's strange to me, because it's a very funny scene about somebody who wastes away; it has a very real double edge even now.
Do you feel like your show has something for everyone?
It is completely accessible for everyone. The show is
hosted and narrated by a guy playing a retired diva — very specifically parodying
The Lives of Lincoln Center fundraisers you get on PBS with Beverly Sills sitting
in the corner doing tedious and endless narration, dropping names, telling funny
anecdotes about herself. Our Sylvia Bills is that prototype taken to a more comic
level. In fact, Sills came to see Bills in Lincoln Center and loved her.
That hook of the narration is like being spoon-fed what you should look for before you see it. It makes the scene completely accessible. There are certainly going to be opera people who will get stuff in the text and puns on the libretto that the basic audience won't get, but there is roaring from the entire audience all night on various levels for various things. Some of it is vocal comedy, some physical, some slapstick; a lot of it is Sylvia's narration.
It's not just having people come out and sing in falsetto; the personalities of the singers are put before you and available during the course of the evening. The audience can see them develop through the way they play their opera and their rivalry. It's inherent in opera, but in the regular opera, you're just not suppose to play it.
Where do you
see yourself going? Do you think you'll be doing this forever?
I'm thinking that
I'd personally like to segue into directing straight opera and bringing some life
to that. I've also begun to write, and I have a weekly public radio spot in New
York; I make a guest appearance as Vera during a classical music program every
Sunday and advance opinions about anything.
The singing is also limited by time. My voice is not as capable of what it used to be in terms of pure height and flexibility; it's richer and darker. All the things that happen to a regular soprano when they reach 50 are happening to me.
I don't see myself out there when I no longer have something to offer in terms of operatic singing. It's a transitional time for me. If the company continues to get more work, I would like to continue with it and teach younger singers, direct more. If the company winds down, I also see myself directing. I also have a career as a teacher and a coach; I enjoy that very much.
If you were to do straight opera what would be your
number one choice?
To direct? Hmmm. For me, the more dramatic the opera, the more
I feel I would like to direct it. What I would love to direct is one of the roles
that I've done a lot, for instance, Tosca, Traviata, or Girl of the Golden West.
I wish Puccini had written at least five more operas where the baritone chases
the soprano around the room; then I'd have a lot more scenes to do.
