Mixing hee hee with high C
Kyra Millan and Tina Faye are the latest performers to help classical music find its funny bone
“Imagine going into a school gym and talking to 600 students about opera. Good luck. The best way to reach them was humour.”
KYRA MILLAN
OPERA SINGER
Opera is a dangerous business for any soprano — stabbings, madness and suicide frequently befall her — so it’s no surprise that a soprano with a funny bone would mine opera’s dark side for laughs.
Kyra Millan, a singer whose specialty is music education, has long used humour to connect with audiences leery of the art form or with negative opinions of classical music. “We have to alleviate the fear,” says Millan. Inspired by classical artists Victor Borge, Anna Russell and Mary Lou Fallis — all of whom integrated humour into their performances — Millan has formed a performing partnership with pianist Tina Faye (not Tina Fey, but also funny).
They’re part of a growing trend in music/humour cross-pollination that include the Piano Guys (one of them plays a cello) and 2Cellos; both acts give rock songs classical treatments with videos seen by millions. Millan and Faye, who have worked together for six years, have been frequent participants in the free daytime concerts offered by the Canadian Opera Company for whom Millan has been visiting schools for15 years as part of their outreach and education program.
It was while trying to entertain schoolchildren that Millan honed her humour.
“Imagine going into a school gym and talking to 600 students about opera. Good luck. The best way to reach them was humour.”
She began working with Faye, her accompanist for solo shows, as a way of reaching wider audiences.
“The best classical performers have a sense of humour,” says Faye.
In their video “Top Ten Opera Deaths,” Millan is stabbed, knocked onto a funeral pyre and smothered by a pillow ( Carmen,
Dido and Aeneas, Othello) by Faye. Although Faye doesn’t sing, she has learned to feel comfortable acting and connecting with audiences.
Their most recent video, “The Lesson,” which shows a vocal student being drilled by a stern, unimpressed teacher, was directed by Rob de Lint, who also directed Corner Gas.
It was put together as a humorous calling card ahead of a planned Ontario tour beginning in the fall.
A sampling of the cabaret-style show can be seen in Hamilton April 9 at the Artword Artbar, with five Toronto shows later in the spring.
“We still legitimately perform the music well,” says Millan.
Keeping the music at a high level is essential to making the comedy/classical show work, says soprano Fallis. She introduced her vain, self-involved Primadonna character more than 30 years ago, first at the Shaw Festival and then Stratford as after-theatre entertainment.
“Drama is the smile and the tears,” Fallis says.
Fallis, a married mother of two, found cabaret-style shows and concerts a better fit for her home life than spending months away with far-off opera companies.
The popular character became Fallis’s calling card, taking her across Canada, and onto radio and television.
“What I did was much more than singing a high note,” says Fallis, who has received the Order of Canada.
Often, the humour isn’t onstage but online. Soprano Christine Goerke, for instance, recently shared pictures of her as Brunnhilde in the COC’s Siegfried that had been doctored by a fan. Wine bottles, iPhones, a valentine and a pizza were impishly added to the scene of Brunnhilde onstage, arm outstretched to Siegfried.
Pianist Jamie Parker, a member of the Gryphon Trio, uses the group’s out-oftown performances to post pseudo-news items about the concert sites, including change rooms and, at one location, the bathrooms.
“It doesn’t take me long to see the funny side of things,” says Parker, who calls himself the Parker News Network.
“The bottom line is I love to laugh and I enjoy making others laugh too.”