Inner workings part of opera’s show
GRB venue gives patrons glimpse at underpinnings usually hidden
Just days before Houston Grand Opera’s postHarvey debut Friday night at the George R. Brown Convention Center, a small preview crowd lingering in the makeshift lobby of the exhibition hall heard something astonishing — opera singers warming up.
The sound, filtering through the curtains serving as walls, was an accident. It wasn’t supposed to be noteworthy. Yet it was.
After seeing the audiences gleam with excitement, HGO staff realized that when one of the country’s largest opera institutions is forced to expose itself, the consequences can be revelatory, even exciting for audiences.
“It was something no one could ever hear at the Wortham,” said Molly Dill, HGO’s producing stage manager.
The Wortham Theater, of course, is the opera’s usual home, a part of the down-
town Theater District that was flooded by Hurricane Harvey’s record-setting rainfall. With the Wortham closed for repairs until May, the opera has been frantically preparing this cavernous space inside the GRB into a makeshift opera hall dubbed the Resilience Theater.
It’s a feat with little to no precedence in itself, transforming the exhibit hall while also staging a production of “La Traviata” outside of its usual design studios and familiar stage dimensions. As such, national media outlets have come to town, ready to share this unique story that serves as a tidy metaphor for the temporary homemaking many Houstonians have been saddled with since Harvey struck.
Facts that marvel
But while much of the narrative has been focused on this resettlement and rushed production for “La Traviata,” which opens Friday night, there’s another wrinkle that adds to the challenges facing the opera: They’ve also been preparing a second production, “Julius Caesar,” which opens next week.
“It’s like we’re working on three productions at the same time: ‘La Traviata,’ ‘Julius Caesar’ and the venue,” Dill said.
Walking through the maze of curtain and electrical wire that is HGO’s backstage, Dill explained that the Wortham has apparatuses that make it easy to do a “turn,” a term used to describe the change from one production to another. Now, crew members must use golf cart-sized vehicles to help haul away the raked stage of “La Traviata,” a 19th-century Parisian era show, and put in “Julius Caesar,” which features Egyptian imagery by way of a Hollywood studio.
Looking around the space, Dill marveled at the achievement of the Resilience Theater not with adjectives or emotions but with facts:
• Twenty-six 50-foot semitrucks worth of equipment were brought into this 120,000 square foot space.
• The space uses nearly a mile of truss, the ceiling-level framework that holds lights and other equipment. That’s so much truss that the HGO bought out the entire state of Texas’ supply, shipping the rest in from New Jersey.
‘Just have fun’
In the dark of the hall — designers were testing the stage lights and so had the house lights off — Dill looked down at a clipboard with the HGO’s frantic production schedule, impressed that everything appeared to be moving along on schedule, impressed that for every one of the hundreds of logistical obstacles that presented itself, her team has been able to think up a solution.
Names written on sheets of paper then propped on music stands serve as dressing room signs. Instead of a backstage door, a sign is taped onto the curtain in the back of the lobby. Instead of the Wortham’s lavish restrooms, HGO has imported “luxury” portable
bathrooms.
The entire operatic setup also is drastically rearranged in a way that makes audiences feel both closer to the artists and also less constrained visually — audiences are able to look around and see, essentially, parts of the opera’s underside.
That’s because there isn’t really a backstage section of the Resilience Theater, so components like dressing rooms, light boards, monitors and the orchestra — normally hidden inside the pit — all exist on the same playing field. The result is that all of the “hidden” elements of an opera production, though still obscured by curtains, now feel within the audience’s reach.
“Just have fun with the crazy, wide open space,” Jim Robinson told a crowd of wide-eyed singers Wednesday night. Robinson, who is directing “Julius Caesar,” spent the evening helping singers acquaint themselves with this unusual space.
“Ever since Harvey, we were all plunged into this one-day-ata-time mode,” Dill said. “But, at the same time, we knew where we needed to be at the end.
“We’re almost there.”