Pageants paved her way to the Met Opera
S HE’S sung her way through six beauty pageants. Now Angel Blue, 2005’s Miss Hollywood, is ready for prime time: She’ll make her Met Opera debut Monday in “La Bohème.”
Visually speaking, the role of poor, consumptive little Mimi is a stretch for this soprano, who’s a statuesque 5-foot-11. Luckily, her onstage lover stands about 2 inches taller.
“When we’re singing together, he’s good about standing up really straight — and I usually have my knees bent,” the 33-year-old tells The Post of tenor Dmytro Popov, who sings Rodolfo. “Hopefully, people will pay more attention to the singing.”
Plácido Domingo has: The great singer-conductor has hailed her as “the next Leontyne Price.”
It was Price’s recordings that Blue listened to on her Mattel toy walkman while growing up in California, the daughter of a gospel-singing pastor and a mother who played violin and piano. They took her to “Turandot” when she was 4, and that Puccini opera, about an ice queen and the man who melts her heart, left her spellbound.
“I sat still for the whole thing,” Blue says. “I started saying that I wanted to be an opera singer. I didn’t know if I had any talent for it, but I liked the way the music made me feel, even if I didn’t understand the words.”
Modeling gigs and pageant wins helped pay for her voice lessons at UCLA, where she got her master’s degree in music in 2007. And her sister contestants, says Blue — who owns copies of both of Sandra Bullock’s “Miss Congeniality” films — are nicer than you’d think.
“I had wonderful friends in pageantry,” says Blue, who had several of them at her wedding last year. “[Beauty contestants] are perceived as catty, but I found more divos and divas in the opera world than I ever did in pageantry.”
Still, she says, she has a horror story: At one pageant, she became friendly with Miss Kansas, who asked Blue to zip up her dress — and Blue (accidentally) broke the zipper.
“She looked at me [as if to say] ‘What did you do?!’ ” Blue says. “We had to sew her into her gown, but she went out there and looked stunning.” Their friend- ship, she adds, never recovered.
For the past eight years, Blue’s sung in concert halls all over Europe; last summer, she sang in Central Park as part of the Met’s recital series. The prospect of performing on its stage fills her with emotion.
“I’m so thankful to be in this great American opera house, singing for my people,” she says, her voice trembling.
“I’m California-trained, and I’m so happy to be singing in my country! I can’t wait till we open and I can see the Statue of Liberty!”