Orlando native, opera conductor has unlikely hobby
Robin Stamper close to goal of 400 trips on roller coasters around U.S.
TAMPA — It may seem absurd that the Juilliard-trained pianist who conducts Opera Tampa shows is also an off-the-charts thrill seeker of theme park roller coasters, but strap in for this ride. He can show you a connection.
Robin Stamper is the artistic director and chorus master for Opera Tampa, the resident opera company for the David A. Straz Jr. Center for the Performing Arts. He’s a detail-oriented musician who has played Chopin and Liszt for Leonard Bernstein.
But off the clock, he’s an adrenaline junkie who is closing in on a goal of 400 trips on roller coasters around the country.
Talk to Stamper long enough and he just might convince you that Verdi’s twisted love story “La Traviata,” which he is conducting this month at the Straz Center, and that weightless feeling you get on a coaster’s free fall moment have a lot in common. They both take some getting used to and are worth the effort.
Stamper, 64, is an Orlando native, and says being raised in the center of the theme park universe has stuck with him — though he admits he was “terrified” of the wild rides when he was younger. Now, he’s a member of the American Coaster Enthusiasts club and has recorded 383 trips on coasters.
He’s lived in Tampa with his husband Nick for nine years, just a few miles away from Busch Gardens, where they visit frequently since Iron Gwazi is one of his favorite coasters ever.
He has been on coasters so extreme that some people pass out. He admits he has “grayed out,” which is the feeling of a partial loss of vision or consciousness because of the extreme turns or drops. But that just became a challenge: Don’t let it happen again on the third and fourth trip around.
The hobby is not unlike getting someone acquainted with the centuries-old art form of opera, he said. It can intimidate people, but once they dive in, they will discover how fascinating and complex it can be.
“If someone has never been on a
roller coaster and are a little apprehensive, you take them on a kiddie coaster, like Air Grover at Busch Gardens,” Stamper said. “You don’t put somebody on Hades 360 (a huge Wisconsin looping wooden roller coaster). That would be like taking them to ‘Der Rosenkavalier,’ a three-hour Strauss opera.”
You take them to “Carmen,” he said, or “La Boheme,” or the April 19-21 production at the Straz Center of “La Traviata,” the world’s most-performed opera.
“It’s such a multimedia art form,” Stamper said. “The music, the beauty of the voices, the sets.
The singers have to be actors so the music has to add to the drama, not just a pretty piece. It is so multifaceted that people can get different things out of it.”
Even better, he said, is to get them started young, just like you might take a kid on Walt Disney World’s Space Mountain.
“You take them as a parent to have that experience and enjoy it with them so they feel safe.”
This summer he is going to the Glimmerglass Opera Festival in upstate New York, which pioneered baroque opera in the U.S. But he’s also using the opportunity
to visit 10 theme parks in the Northeast, adding 35 to 40 trips to his coaster list.
Some of the coasters he will seek out are Wildcat’s Revenge, a renovated historic coaster at Hersheypark in Pennsylvania with a 140-foot hill that plunges into an 82-degree drop. And he’s headed to Six Flags Great Adventure in New Jersey, where Kingda Ka is the fastest roller coaster in America and the tallest roller coaster in the world.
With nearly 400 trips, he has many tales to tell. His favorite Florida rides are Iron Gwazi at Busch Gardens; Mako, the record-setting 200-foot-tall hypercoaster at SeaWorld; and Velocicoaster, the Jurassic Park-themed coaster at Universal Orlando.
It was the “giga coaster” called Intimidator 305 at Kings Dominion in Virginia on which Stamper briefly lost consciousness. The first drop is 300 feet at an 85-degree angle, and that sharp turn is where he and most people on that intense ride will lose it, he said.
“But unlike people half my age, I did it over and over again until I could overcome it,” Stamper said. “I can feel it coming. I just mentally talked myself into not doing it.”
He has a few cheats. He doesn’t like being “stapled in” tightly by the belts and restraints so he will arch his back as the belts are being fastened to give him some wiggle room later. And on really wild rides, he looks for a way to dig his heels in, usually in a ridge found in the floor of most coasters.
Last summer, he went to Wisconsin’s Mount Olympus theme park, home of the dreaded Hades 360. It’s an award-winning coaster with a 360-degree roll that even shoots under the parking lot in the world’s longest underground tunnel.
“I couldn’t find a place to put my feet and I gave myself a hernia trying to dig my feet in,” Stamper said.
At a recent rehearsal for “La Traviata,” Stamper and stage director Frank McClain spent an hour on a single scene of the actors moving around a gaming table, prodding one actor to walk a little slower to allow the music to swell in some parts and directing how long to make a comic handshake.
So is part of the coaster attraction, I ask, that you are being flung around with no control over your body and floating out of your seat? But as a stage director you have to be in control of every single minute, note and hand gesture?
“Bingo!” he said, tapping the tip of his snout for my “on the nose” question.
“I’m a major control freak with music,” Stamper said, “but with that I’m basically forced to let go.”