How outreach program assisted budding opera star Kendra Broom.
After early help from von Stade, Broom now a budding opera star
Sophomore year was a chaotic time for Kendra Broom. At least, “chaotic” might be the only word to begin to describe it.
On a Tuesday afternoon in Berkeley, hours before dress rehearsal, Broom, 27, recalls the wild circumstances she was in at age 15 — a situation that makes her current position, a budding opera star playing Mélisande in West Edge Opera’s “Pelléas & Mélisande,” opening Saturday, Aug. 4 — feel like an unlikely marvel.
“It was called the Chaos Castle,” she says, referring to where she was living at the time — in San Leandro in a large house that served as a sort of hippie commune. She was living on her own, trying to stay afloat at San Leandro High School while cleaning houses to make the low rent.
Before that, Broom had bounced around for years as a child with her nomadic mother and brother, at times with the members of this commune collective, before finally settling in their own house briefly in San Lorenzo.
But then, the dot-com bubble burst, her mother lost her job and Broom’s family returned to the commune, which had settled in the Chaos Castle in San Leandro.
“She took in a lot of people who were kind of on the outskirts, falling through the cracks, including me and my brother and my mom,” Broom says of the woman at the head of the commune. “But there were a lot of people coming in and out of the house that maybe shouldn’t have been around kids.”
As for Broom’s own mother, after losing her job, “that was probably the darkest time.” An overwhelmed single parent with undiagnosed depression and anxiety, her mother found another job at a bank and would escape online into video games, where she met her future husband. Eventually, she decided to move to Indiana to join him, bringing along Broom’s brother.
But, at 15, Broom decided to remain in San Leandro, on her own. She was rooted by the lifeline that was Young Musicians Choral Orchestra — known then as Young Musicians Program — the Bay Area music outreach program that serves low-income, underprivileged youth.
“I couldn’t not be in YMP,” says Broom who had auditioned and joined the program in middle school. “I saw the directionlessness of the people around me, and I was like, this is my one thing. I can’t leave.”
In the summers, YMP facilitated a robust program that provided free food, public transit, clothes and music education. Throughout the year, alongside recitals and weekly lessons, it provided a rigorous support system that guided its young members to graduation and into college.
“To be given goals, to be given the resources to meet those goals, to be given the supportive group of people who believe I can meet those goals — I mean, it was the direction in my life,” Broom says. The program was “home” for its members, each of whom faced various struggles living at or near poverty level. “The summer was always like a homecoming. It was finally like, OK, we get to breathe.”
YMP was also where Broom found her voice. Before entering the program, she had never considered herself a singer, despite varied music exposure from music circles singing “filk” — science fiction fan music — to the polished tastes of her mother, a “big lady with a big voice” who Broom believes should have been an opera singer.
“She’d always been into vocal music, so growing up I would just listen to whatever she would listen to,” Broom says. “She’d have Wagner on and musicals and Verdi.”
YMP, along with the graces of the revered opera stalwart Frederica von Stade and her friend Jackie Cloren, would go on to pull Broom out of her flimsy living situation.
“I was just taking it day-toThis day, and I was just trying to get by,” Broom remembers of that period living alone in San Leandro.
After Daisy Newman, YMCO’s executive director, saw the commune, she began searching for an alternative solution. Then von Stade, now on the board of YMCO, became aware of Broom’s reality after dropping her off in San Leandro one night. Unable to house Broom herself as a traveling singer, von Stade contacted Cloren, who immediately welcomed Broom into her own home in San Leandro.
“It was just a mom’s instinct that this kid cannot do this,” von Stade says. “I think she moved into Jackie’s with a plastic garbage bag of her stuff.”
newfound stability, along with the help of YMP, which facilitated full-fledged college guidance and support, including taking Broom to auditions for music programs, allowed Broom to excel in her final two years in high school. She went on to study at the Manhattan School of Music, and eventually the prestigious Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, where she just completed her program. Looking back at her former situation, Broom simply counts off her “list of heroes” — people like Newman, von Stade, Cloren and YMP vocal coaches like Jim Meredith and the late David Tigner, whom she calls a father figure. She maintains a relationship with her “incredibly loving” mother, who found more stable ground and lives with her husband in New Jersey.
Yet as Broom looks ahead at her future, she still retains the sense of anxiety of feeling like an “outsider,” as if a career is unpromised.
“You are an opera singer already,” the West Edge’s General Director Mark Streshinsky assures her. “You’re at a level of international quality.”
Everyone who has heard her agrees. But Broom makes a face, as if she is reluctant to accept this as truth.
“I’ve grown up literally in Chaos Castle,” she says.