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| Key'mon Murrah as Orpheus in Orpheus and Eurydice. Credit: Philip Newton |
Key’mon recently sat down with Seattle Opera over Zoom for a conversation that covered his journey to becoming an opera singer, the challenges of making a career as a countertenor, his interpretation of Orpheus, and his upcoming recital.
In a conversation over Zoom, Orpheus and Eurydice’s set designer, Carey Wong, sat down with Seattle Opera to discuss how he got started in opera, his vision for the Orpheus sets, and what excites him about the future of theater.
Carey Wong has worked for over 45 years as a stage designer and arts administrator in the United States, Canada, and abroad. He has designed sets and/or costumes for over 300 productions of operas, plays, musicals, and ballets, as well as art installations and themed environments. Currently a freelance designer and theater consultant based in Gig Harbor, Washington, he began his career as General Production Manger and Resident Designer of Portland Opera for eight seasons. This was followed by two seasons as Artistic Administrator and Resident Designer at Opera Memphis. While at Portland Opera, Mr. Wong designed sets and costumes for 12 new productions including the American premiere of Ernst Krenek’s Life of Orestes (in an English translation by the composer commissioned for the premiere), the world premiere of Bernard Herrmann’s Wuthering Heights, and a rare staging of Carl Maria von Weber’s Der Freischütz. Three of his Portland productions were shared by Seattle Opera.
Seattle Opera continues its 2021/22 season with a dynamic lineup of opera events, including community conversations, artist recitals, laser shows, and a timely and award-winning opera.
In this Seattle Opera interview, Tesori recounts the legacy of her grandfather, her approach to composing, and collaborating with Blue librettist Tazewell Thompson.
JEANINE TESORI is a composer of musical theater, opera, television and film. She won the Tony Award for Best Score (with bookwriter & lyricist, Lisa Kron) for the musical Fun Home. Her other musicals include Caroline, or Change (with Tony Kushner), Shrek the Musical (with David Lindsay-Abaire), Thoroughly Modern Millie (with Dick Scanlan), Violet (with Brian Crawley), Kimberly Akimbo (with Lindsay-Abaire) and Soft Power (with David Henry Hwang) which was her second work after Fun Home to be a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Drama. Along with Missy Mazzoli, she is one of the first women to be commissioned by the Metropolitan Opera. Her operas include A Blizzard on Marblehead Neck (Tony Kushner, libretto), Blue (Tazewell Thompson, libretto) which received the MCANA Award for Best New Opera, and the upcoming Grounded (George Brant, libretto) at the Met. In addition to her work as a composer, Tesori is the Founding Artistic Director of New York City Center’s Encores! Off-Center series, Supervising Vocal Producer of Steven Spielberg’s West Side Story, and lecturer in music at Yale University.
In a conversation over Zoom, Seattle Opera writer Glenn Hare and Tazewell Thompson talk about the characters he created in Blue, Tazewell’s childhood, and how he came to love opera—especially operas about nuns.
Tazewell Thompson is the 2020 Music Critics Association of North America award recipient for Best New Opera in North America for Blue. The New York Times and Washington Post both noted the opera as a Best in Classical Music 2019. He has over 150 directing credits, including 30 world and American premieres, in opera houses and theaters in the US, France, Spain, Italy, Africa, Japan, and Canada. He earned an EMMY Award nomination for Best Direction and Best Classical Production for Porgy and Bess Live from Lincoln Center. At Seattle Opera Thompson serves as a coach/mentor in the Jane Lang Davis Creation Lab for up-and-coming Washington State librettists and composers. He was also a panelist on the 2018 community forum, Breaking Glass: Hyperlinking Opera & Issues, a national collaboration with Glimmerglass Festival. Blue is his Seattle Opera directorial debut.
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| Tazewell Thompson, Briana Hunter, and Kenneth Kellogg. |
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| Briana Hunter (The Mother) and Kenneth Kellogg (The Father) in Blue. Credit: Karli Cadel / The Glimmerglass Festival |
Mary, what’s the difference between working on the Costume crew and the Wardrobe crew?
Different skill set in many cases. The Costume crew is a group of artisans that have skills in building, fitting, altering costumes; tailoring, dress-making and all things in between: millinery work [hats]; and there’s often some footwear that needs to be modified or built, depending on the production.
And Wardrobe?
We are engineers. We make the costumes work for the production. That sometimes involves specific rigging, if there’s a quick-change...as we go forward in the rehearsal process you often find out those little specific things.
So it’s Applied Costuming; getting the costumes on this particular group of people, for this staging of the show.
Right. And in addition to getting the costumes on and off we support the performers in their performance: getting them dressed on time, making sure they’re comfortable, making sure they have water or whatever they need for their vocal production. (Sometimes that’s little candies or mints or something like that.)
It’s an intimate collaboration: you’re in the dressing rooms with them, sort of their ground crew.
That’s true. We are there for them, for whatever comes up.
You’re working Wardrobe now; but you also worked at the Costume Shop when these amazing La bohème costumes were first created.
Thirty years ago! Summer of 1991, I was a cog in the wheel of building these exquisite costumes. It was a huge crew, with many artisans from different theaters in Seattle.
What was it like to work in the Costume Shop in those days? They were over in the building that’s now the Armory, in those days the “Food Circus...”
They called it the “Center House.” We had a lot of space up there on the Fourth Floor. It was an old 1920s-30s building without air conditioning, so the windows would be wide open in the summertime, and we’d hear all the sounds of everybody enjoying the Fun Forest at Seattle Center.
In the story of La bohème Mimì is a seamstress...sounds like where she would go to work.
Exactly. She might have been building her own little pink hat. It was a great group, well-managed by some longtime employees of Seattle Opera. We were split between dress-makers and tailors, producing the women’s garments and the men’s garments.
Musetta’s big yellow dress is iconic for this production of Bohème; but the guys look very smart, too.
Glad to hear that, we worked diligently. It was a hot summer and we were working with all those wools and velvets. Martin’s designs were superbly specific to the era. There was not a detail that was missed. The men’s coats, vests, and trousers all have fully-functioning pockets. Sometimes in costumes something appears functional but it’s not. But Martin required the real thing.
The choice was made to set the opera in the 1890s, around the time of composition. Which is not actually when the book takes place...the book is fifty years earlier.
Right, but it works beautifully.
Martin Pakledinaz designed costumes for a lot of great Seattle Opera productions over the years: Orpheus and Eurydice, Lohengrin, Iphigeníe en Tauride and the Ring cycle.
He was a joy to work with. Not always easy! But just impeccable designs. And thirty years later, we’re presenting them again, and they still stand.
Is it rare, for costumes to have that longevity?
This production has been used frequently by Seattle Opera, and rented out to other companies. There’s been a lot of maintenance, cheers to the Seattle Opera Wardrobe and Costume Shops for that. And it’s just as gorgeous as I remember it.
Do you have a favorite garment in the show?
I’m very fond of Rodolfo’s coats...but that little pink hat!
La cuffietta, the bonnet Rodolfo buys for Mimì!
There’s such a tenderness to what it represents. I think it’s a lovely little piece.
It’s so distinct, it sticks out, you can’t miss it. And you get why someone would become fixated on it.
Why she would have it on her deathbed.
Is there anything unusual about your specific Wardrobe duties for this Bohème?
All of us in Wardrobe, our performers and everybody here in the theater, we’re all helping each other in this age of COVID.
The singers go out onstage unmasked; but is everybody masked, backstage?
We have a whole protocol of when the singers put their mask on, how they take it off, where they put it when they take it off...we use little Tupperware containers, clearly labeled with each singer’s name. The performer is responsible for handling their own mask, of course. Before they step onstage, it goes into the lidded container, and that’s reversed when they exit the stage and come back to their dressing room.
You guys have thought everything through!
We try.
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