HGO reaches out to its youngest fans with ‘The Armadillo’s Dream’
Opera-centric tale takes readers on an adventure through the Bayou City
Meet Sandy. An otherwise everyday Texas armadillo, Sandy is distinguished by his striking purplish-blue shell. That, and, when not digging for bugs along the banks of Buffalo Bayou, Sandy yearns to sing onstage with Houston Grand Opera.
Maybe someone once left the Wortham’s stage door open at rehearsal.
Sandy is also the star of “The Armadillo’s Dream,” an original children’s book published in November under the auspices of HGO’s community-relations wing, HGOco.
Underwritten by longtime patron Connie Kwan-Wong and written by Dennis Arrowsmith, HGOco’s Touring Programs manager, the book transplants a popular Bolivian folk tale to the Bayou City in order to underline the value of perseverance.
Cleverly, it also folds HGO’s next production, George Bizet’s “The Pearl Fisher,” into the story.
“It was a lot of fun to write,” says first-time author Arrowsmith, also a baritone in HGO’s chorus. “I do my best thinking in the shower, so I would think of lines in the shower; then I would jump out and dictate them into my phone.”
Spanish for “little armored one,” the armadillo is a familiar figure in Central and South American folklore, its shell often symbolizing protection. It lent its name to Austin’s iconic ’70s music venue Armadillo World Headquarters and, for decades, its likeness to Lone Star Beer ads. Certain palates have acquired a taste for armadillo; during the Depression these creatures were known as “Hoover hogs,” and armadillo tamales are not unheard of.
They even scuttle around Castle Dracula in Tod Browning’s classic 1931 horror film, helping to keep the Count’s crypt free from worms and other vermin.
To Arrowsmith, armadillos are “not the state animal, but it’s an animal that’s so readily thought of as Texan (that) I thought it would be a great fit for HGO.” As his Sandy wanders along the bayou, UH-Downtown and Anthony Thompson Shumate’s “Monumental Moments” sculptures looming in the background, his dreams of performing onstage at the Wortham are summarily dismissed by a cricket, a frog and a trio of canaries.
These bird-critics tell him “singers are graceful, with sun-colored wings … you’ll never know the joy that singing brings.”
Here “The Armadillo’s Dream” diverges from the traditional folktale by adding a quasimagical storm that washes Sandy either into a dream or the bayou itself. His shell is recovered and used in a crucial moment of “The Pearl Fishers,” coming to the Wortham Jan. 25 through Feb. 8. Since moving to Houston in 1999, Arrowsmith has ridden out hurricanes Allison, Ike, Harvey, and all the lesser storms in between, so inserting weather into his story was both an easy choice and an appropriate way to address one of the region’s most persistent pitfalls.
“Countless storms have affected (Houstonians) in so many different ways,” he says. “I think it’s a good way to talk about these subjects with kids. We don’t want to necessarily shy away from that (disastrous) aspect of it, but it can also be a little ambiguous at the same time.”
Water also permeates “The Armadillo’s Dream” in a different way: Armenian artist Eduard Hakobyan’s lush watercolor illustrations. Though the two never met, Arrowsmith and Hakobyan — who was recruited by Kwan-Wong — collaborated closely. Arrowsmith would send Hakobyan photos of the landscape around the Wortham and Buffalo Bayou Park (including landmarks like the Wortham Fountain), along with instructions that he wanted the artwork to look “homemade.”
“It feels very three-dimensional,” says Arrowsmith. “I didn’t want it to be flat. I think watercolor is such a great medium for that; it has lots of layers to it.”
Interestingly, however, “The Armadillo’s Dream” was in the works well before Harvey laid waste to the Wortham, forcing HGO to perform its entire 2017-18 season at the George R. Brown Convention Center. It’s not hard to view its publication mere weeks after the company’s move back home as a stroke of serendipity.
“I had nothing to do with that,” Arrowsmith says with a big laugh. “But we’re thrilled to be back.”
“The Armadillo’s Dream” now belongs to a most singular subset of children’s books — those about opera. Others include “Opera Cat,” “The Dog Who Sang at the Opera,” “Bantam of the Opera” and “Westward Ho Carlotta,” in which a diva travels to the Wild West and uses her singing to tame unruly coyotes.
“They’re all stories about the power of the human voice,” says Arrowsmith. “I think using animals is kind of a great way to excite kids, because they really respond to animals singing for some reason.”
Soon his book will take its place alongside those others in the repertoire of Storybook Opera, HGOco’s program of 30-minute musical performances for kids between prekindergarten and second grade. For older children, Opera to Go presents slightly longer, more fully staged works, such as current production “Cinderella in Spain,” playing through Dec. 12.
As Touring Programs manager, Arrowsmith coordinates HGOco’s many performances at schools, libraries and other venues across the Houston area. “We’re always trying to find new stories about our city or about our community that can hopefully draw people into the art form of opera, which is sometimes an intimidating art form,” he says.
Among the first questions HGOco’s performers ask their audience, Arrowsmith explains, are “Who’s seeing an opera for the first time?” and “Can anyone tell us what they think opera is?”
“They always know it’s singing, but usually it’s like ‘a person singing high’ or ‘a person singing loud,’ ” he says.
But HGOco’s mission stretches beyond demonstrating how opera is, in Arrowsmith’s words, “the Olympics of singing.” Rather, their intent is to show — by blending disciplines such as acting, singing, dancing, costumes and set design — how opera can be “the synthesis of all art forms.”
“We have all these different programs that help kids work together,” says Arrowsmith. “I think that’s also a lot of the themes we try to promote — collaboration, working together and stimulating creativity in young minds.”
HGO’s programming is also designed to help erase the lingering stigma that opera is elitist. For instance, Arrowsmith notes that many of its events are free to the public. Additionally, a growing number of productions are bilingual, as is “The Armadillo’s Dream” itself: the original print run is 2,000 English copies and 1,000 in Spanish. A bilingual reading of the book, featuring music by Houston-based composer and frequent HGOco collaborator Mark Buller, is scheduled for Saturday at Talento Bilingue de Houston, immediately before a performance of “Cinderella in Spain.”
Early efforts of reaching HGO’s target audience with “The Armadillo’s Dream” have been encouraging, Arrowsmith reports. After one recent reading at Blue Willow Bookshop on Memorial, the owner told him his book’s sales far exceeded the pace of similar events at the store. He’s noticed how well singing can quiet restive toddlers, saying, “When I would sing during the story, they would just stop moving.” But he still brings along an armadillo puppet as a handy backup.
That wasn’t necessary during another reading much closer to home, though. Arrowsmith’s niece and nephew weren’t shy about replying to the narrator’s questions like “But what happened next? Would you like me to tell?”
“Just to hear them be like ‘Tell us!’; to actually have the audience answer the question, was so fun,” the author says as he smiles. “And then when I read it to them again, they knew the answer.”