13.

‘Just for tonight, please do exactly as we rehearsed’

Confessions of a chorister

Singing onstage can be a challenging and dangerous job sometimes. I would love to tell you that every time I’m in front of an audience, I’m 100 per cent focused on my performance, and that all I hear surrounding me is the beautiful music. But even though it may look like my entire focus is centred around telling the story, there is always a part of my attention on the lookout just in case something goes wrong. Most of the time, my colleagues will have my back if they are close enough to help me out, push me out of the way or get my attention if necessary. But at times when I’ve found myself freewheeling it up there on my own, well, it’s up to me to sort it out. One moment of lapsed concentration can spell disaster.

Sometimes, things just happen through no fault of my own, and I have only one choice: work with it, by whatever means necessary, without drawing attention to myself in the process. This is where my experience and professionalism should come into play, and usually they do. But then there are the disasters that I create for myself, and these can be just as challenging. Simply put, my weakness is laughing onstage. And I don’t mean laughing when something is funny, or when I’ve been directed to find a particular scene amusing. No, I’m talking about the exact opposite: laughing when it is completely inappropriate to do so. In the theatre, this is called corpsing, and there’s a whole separate chapter on it!

I’ve spent many operas trying to avoid pieces of set, props, colleagues, children, animals, curtains, food, choking on stage food, swallowing throat lozenges prematurely, coughing fits, face planting, spillages on the stage, falling down a raked stage, falling onto a revolve, falling off a revolve, furniture, horse droppings, tripping on someone’s costume, getting stuck on someone’s costume, getting stuck behind a large piece of set, glitter falling into my eyes, snow landing in my mouth, sword mishaps and personal prop disasters. I’ve had shoes that fall apart, heels that break, skirts that fall down and wigs that fall off. I’ve lost false eyelashes, executed a dance routine with a huge bustle swinging between my legs, and dodged a dangling spider. I’ve taken the wrong exit, realised it’s a false exit, then had to walk back onstage, frantically trying to find another option. And the list goes on.

When dealing with a piece of set that seems to be encroaching on my space when it shouldn’t be, and I’ve been directed to focus on something in the opposite direction, things can potentially get interesting. In a production of Madama Butterfly directed by Graeme Murphy, a vast revolve creates the centrepiece of the set, surrounded by a number of large and very impressive LED screens. Different images are displayed on these screens throughout the opera, creating not only an extension of the set but allowing infinite possibilities with the use of projections. With them being so new at the time, there were teething problems. And in situations like this, timing is everything.

During Act One when Madama Butterfly’s uncle, The Bonze, enters, he’s in a foul mood and the geishas – us chorus girls – are scattered around the stage, terrified, trying our best to avoid him. With The Bonze approaching on my left side, the revolve starts turning me towards the right side of the stage. At the same time, the large screens are changing position and I find myself heading straight towards them. Every night it reminded me of the scene from Star Wars in which Luke, Leia, Han Solo and Chewbacca are trapped in the trash compactor, desperately trying to save themselves – which is exactly how I felt. Here I am, pretending to fear The Bonze on my left, executing some pretty impressive ‘holy shit’ acting, while on my right I’m doing all I can to not get squashed, with my ‘holy shit’ acting feeling very real. Meanwhile, the orchestra is still playing, we are still singing, and the scene is moving along. But deep down, just trying to stay alive and not crush myself into my colleagues – who are also fighting the same fight – has become my sole focus. The whole survival sequence passed by in a matter of seconds, but the fear was real!

Those of us who have covered or performed the role of Kate Pinkerton in the Moffatt Oxenbould production of Madama Butterfly have had issues with ‘the handbag’ – the bag that Kate carries when making her first entrance onto the stage. In a heightened emotional moment, her husband Pinkerton, overcome by shame, hurriedly exits, bumping into Kate along the way. Shocked by his behaviour, Kate is directed to stumble and drop the handbag. Now, at this point, she is standing on a small bridge over a channel of water that runs around the full perimeter of the stage. Trying not to drop the handbag into the water, instead having it land on the bridge behind me, required real skill. Thankfully, I never tossed the handbag into the drink, but annoyingly that sodding handbag never fell in the same place twice. When I needed to retrieve the dreaded prop and quickly enter the main part of the stage to deliver my lines, I’d be frantically looking around trying to find it. One night, another soprano accidentally dropped the bag into the water, but I can’t recall whether she tried to retrieve it, or just let it sink to the bottom and get caught among the pebbles! I think if I’d dropped it into the channel, I would have found it very difficult to keep it together.

Whatever stage direction we are asked to execute, we need to make it work. Finding a good position to die on stage is a tricky one. You need to be able to see the conductor, especially if you’re still meant to be singing – and yes, we have perfected the seemingly impossible skill of dying with our eyes open. Singing aside, this can be utterly convincing to an audience … until we start blinking. At times we’re asked to hit the deck pretty quickly, but if you have to die slowly from a standing position then your landing has to be carefully considered. No-one wants to suffer the dreaded aches and pains resulting from distorted limbs or crooked necks that scream at you to book a physio appointment when you’ve finished the show. Thankfully, there’s always the last-minute physical twitch to get you nice and comfy, and that last spasm can really make a difference.

Another inconvenient ailment that can pop up at any time is the facial itch, and when you’re meant to be dead, the timing couldn’t be worse. I can go a whole day without an itch to scratch, but as soon as I need to play dead, stand still or not draw focus, I can guarantee that an itch will slowly and infuriatingly make itself known. What is even more mysterious is that as soon as I exit the stage, the bloody itch disappears. I reckon that if I hadn’t entered the stage in the first place, it would never have been there!

***

At the end of every performance, the stage manager prepares a show report that records any incidents, mishaps, mistimings, problems and illnesses that have occurred, and this is distributed among management. No-one really wants to be put on show report, but during one performance of Carmen my name was added to the list – along with, of all things, a horse. Francesca Zambello’s production of Carmen, which we received in Australia after it debuted at Covent Garden in 2006, with designs by Tanya McCallin and set in nineteenth-century Seville, is for me the quintessential interpretation of this opera. I love it, and the icing on the cake is the two large and magnificent stallions onstage every night. When not strutting their stuff in the spotlight, Drummer and Spud spent the entire show backstage with their keepers and a trusty dog in an allocated area, so they could be fed and cared for within the confines of a makeshift stable. Nearly all of us would spend as much time as we could spare backstage with the horses, only going to our dressing rooms for quick changes. They were even issued their very own security tags and lanyards, and as they walked through the loading dock of the Sydney Opera House and past security, these would be hung around their necks, proudly displaying their photo ID – just in case anyone questioned their identity.

My experience with horses has not exactly been a positive one. I’ve been thrown off every horse I have ever attempted to ride, so I decided that during a particular season of Carmen I would try to overcome my fear and spend as much time as possible with them. One evening, while waiting to go onstage for the Act Four parade scene, I stood patting Drummer, who had become my favourite. I thought I’d built up a rather trusting relationship with this majestic beast. Little did I know that Drummer had been in a foul mood all day, and while I patted him, he decided to grab onto my left sleeve. This was no ordinary costume: it included vintage lace sleeves made from material purchased overseas, beautifully detailed corsetry, a silk skirt and jacket. Now, Drummer wasn’t interested in the quality or cost of the costume presented before him. He just proceeded to yank at the lace sleeve, unravelling it to the elbow, and suddenly the lace that should have been firmly secured on my left arm now dangled from the mouth of a very pissed-off horse. Seconds later, I had no choice but to walk onstage with that section of my costume missing.

I started waving at the parade unfolding before me with my right hand, trying to keep my now bare left arm as close to my body as possible. After the curtain calls, an amazing dresser, pre-warned about my predicament, handed my costume to the ridiculously talented wardrobe department, who repaired and restitched the lace to the sleeve by the next performance as if nothing had happened. Whoever managed to extract it from Drummer’s mouth in one piece deserved a bottle of champers. I apologised profusely to the wardrobe staff and promised to stay away from the horses from that moment on … but did I? Of course not. They were the best part of the show. I just made sure they were in a better mood.

At times, we enjoy setting challenges for each other that have nothing to do with the running of the production onstage. A friend in an opera chorus overseas tells me that the girls like to see how much of their civilian clothes they can fit underneath their costumes before the curtain call, so they can rush out the door a little quicker at the end of a show. I’ve attempted this over the years, but one incident went horribly wrong. Nearing the end of a performance of My Fair Lady, I decided to wear my ordinary clothes under my curtain-call costume so I could exit the theatre a few minutes early. Wearing a long pleated skirt straight down to my ankles, and a large opera jacket over the top, I decided to ‘underdress’ my jeans, rolling up the cuffs so they wouldn’t be seen. But there was a major flaw in my plan. To get to the stage for the curtain calls, I had to walk up a set of stairs and, lifting the bottom of my skirt in both hands to safely ascend, I exposed the skinny jeans that I had squeezed into moments before. Unfortunately, at the top of the stairs sat Hamish Peters, the head of wardrobe on the show. As I slowly ascended, Hamish glared down at the newly chosen addition to my costume. Too late!

Suffice to say, after that incident, I never did wear the jeans again, although I may have sneakily donned a pair of black leggings underneath the curtain-call skirt a few times. Hamish is now head of performing wardrobe at Opera Australia. If I’m walking past the principal dressing rooms and there are a few dressers sitting on the sofas having a bit of downtime, I will sometimes find Hamish sitting with them. You can guarantee that whenever I walk past, in whatever costume I happen to be wearing, he’ll always say, ‘Excuse me, Miss, do you have anything under that skirt that shouldn’t be there?’ It always makes us giggle. He’ll never let me live it down, but he’s become a great friend so he can get away with it.

In live theatre, you never know what’s going to happen – on or off the stage. Building up a level of trust with your colleagues is certainly important in case you find yourself in a tricky situation – and I certainly did one evening when touring New Zealand with The Barber of Seville and singing the role of Rosina. During one performance, I started undressing to get into costume – a white satin negligee – when I realised I’d chosen to wear a fluorescent bra sporting the American flag to the theatre. What was I thinking? I literally ran around backstage until I found our wardrobe mistress. Now, because my breasts are on the small side, I could have gone on without a bra, but I couldn’t trust the lighting. What if it highlighted my near nakedness to the audience? With about a minute to spare, Prin Barry, our head of wardrobe and our dresser extraordinaire, whispered, ‘Let’s swap!’, and before I knew it, she’d whipped off her own white bra and thrown it towards me as I stood near the doorway for my first entrance. While the orchestra played the introduction, I fastened that bra as if my life depended on it, slipped the negligee back on, took a deep breath and finally walked onstage. All I can say is, thank God the American flag wasn’t on my knickers – and I’m pretty sure Prin felt the same!

I have snuck sweets onstage during a production of John Bell’s Carmen in a scene where we are meant to be playing a card game far upstage, away from the audience. The sweets are the prize for the chorister who places the final card in their hand on the crate first, winning the very competitive game of ‘Last Card’. Then there are the whispered ‘Happy Birthday’s onstage to colleagues celebrating that day, especially if you haven’t managed to see them backstage, in the corridor or in the Green Room. I have even had a conversation onstage with a fellow full-time chorister who also happened to be a qualified solicitor. While I’m standing upstage centre in the doorway with the ladies, executing my best prostitute pose during the Act Two finale of La bohème, she leans over the balcony railing and whispers, ‘Kath, I’ve finished your will. You can sign it when we get back to the dressing room.’ As soon as she said it, we looked at each other and had a good laugh – thankfully allowed in this scene. It’s amazing how you can appear to be solely focused on the job at hand and yet, without anyone noticing, you can be catching up on the legal matters of the day.

When scheduled to perform a show on St Patrick’s Day, it is tradition for a small group of choristers to try to fit a few seconds of an Irish jig into whatever opera we are performing. One year, when St Patrick’s Day fell on a Saturday, we were due to perform two shows, Verdi’s La traviata and Bizet’s Carmen. La traviata became our biggest challenge: the opera is set in nineteenth-century Paris, and the only scene in which we could execute a few steps of the jig would be at Flora’s party in Act Three, set in a Parisian salon where the women sing and dance with tambourines before the entire chorus joins in. As soon as I saw the girls in front of me start jigging their way across the stage decked out in all their Parisian finery, I lost it and could hardly get a note out. Naturally, despite this, I joined in. Being professionals, we even practised in the dressing room before being called to stage, checking to see if we could incorporate it into the dance routine. Carmen, this time a modern production, offered us many opportunities, and we settled on the opening of Act Four in the huge crowd scene, in which we sing and dance with excitement at the arrival of the bullfighters. No-one would have noticed us having our wee salute to St Patrick himself. My mother would have been proud!

***

‘Singing wallpaper’ is another physically and mentally demanding skill my colleagues and I have all mastered. In short, this requires standing still and just singing, or sometimes not singing at all, with no expression whatsoever. When I am required to present this way, it doesn’t take long for my mind to wander. Often, I will find myself compiling my grocery-shopping list, because I usually go to the supermarket after a show. The all-too common To Do List is another distraction. I have an infinite number of To Do Lists – so many in fact, that I have lists that remind me to look at my To Do Lists. So, without really realising it, I will start listing things in my head that need attention, project ideas I have, or anything really. During a performance of Donizetti’s Anna Bolena, the full chorus had been directed to face upstage – essentially standing with our backs to the audience – in a freeze-like state. This meant no turning around, fidgeting or talking. As the soprano delivered the most exquisite aria, I suddenly realised I’d left pesto out of the sandwich I’d made for my break during the matinee. Devastating! So, even though we always appear to be focused and ‘in the moment’, I am certainly guilty of coming onto the stage with a host of insignificant thoughts in tow. I am proud to say, however, that I have never actually fallen asleep onstage!

In the chorus, we have a special tradition of ‘solos’. These are not the solos that have been written into the score, or solos we have been allocated to sing at a particular point in the music. No, I’m talking about solos that occur due to a lack of concentration or when we dare to go on autopilot. I’ve witnessed some of these by my colleagues over the years, and I too have added to our impressive tally. I have started singing chorus numbers a few bars too early, sung a loud high note that was meant to be a low note and even sung entire phrases before our cue. During one scene in Madama Butterfly, the chorus is directed to be frozen in fear, and the only time we move is when we sing the words ‘Ah Cio-Cio-San’ while gesturing dramatically. Probably due to a lack of concentration or being swept up in the drama of it all, I sang ‘Ah Cio-Cio-San’ before anybody else which, following direction, also happened to be accompanied by a large gesture, all while dressed in bright-pink and red organza. Not obvious at all!

I think the most important thing to do when this happens is to remain steadfast in your decision to own it and sing proudly as if it was always meant to have been that way. If you do stop midway, then it is obvious you’ve stuffed up and made a mistake. Easier said than done, sometimes – in front of a live audience, and your colleagues.

The cold sweats you feel when you hear music you’re meant to be singing, but you’re not singing because you’re not where you are meant to be, are terrifying. And yes, during my time in the chorus, I may have missed the odd offstage or two. (An ‘offstage’ is when the chorus gathers to sing at the side of the stage in the wings, behind the stage or in the stairwell.) In a production of Madama Butterfly, a fellow chorister and I were meant to be humming the famous ‘Humming Chorus’ with the soprano and tenor choristers. Unfortunately for the offstage (I think), but fortunately for us, the legendary Kenny Rogers happened to be performing in the Sydney Opera House’s Concert Hall, just on the other side of the Green Room – too close for us not to be tempted! Already changed out of costume and into our civilian clothes after Act One, we were waiting to sing the offstage and go home. As a long-term and avid fan of Kenny, and the owner of many a Kenny Rogers cassette while growing up, I would have considered it scandalous to not take advantage of the opportunity.

As we stood in the corridor at the back of the Concert Hall listening to Kenny belting out the hits from my childhood through a speaker, time seemed to stand still. But, being on the other side of the Green Room, we missed the all-important call to the chorus requesting our presence backstage for the ‘Humming Chorus’. By the time we realised our mistake, the humming had been and gone, Butterfly’s life had ended and there wasn’t a chorister left in the building. On the flip side, singing along to ‘The Gambler’ and ‘Islands in the Stream’ was worth it!

Another no-show happened during a performance of The Pearlfishers by Bizet. Receiving some very important pilates advice from a dancer in the rehearsal room during one of my breaks in the opera, I became so focused on this spontaneous stretch class that I completely missed my stage call! In times like these when you are faced with the very real predicament of stuffing up, it is best to return to the dressing room, make yourself a cup of tea and sit quietly, rather than trying to enter the scene late, drawing attention to your obvious lack of professionalism.

Of course, these admissions could potentially read as an invitation to talk to HR or to spend an extended time in the confessional, but if you stretch it out over the number of years I have been on the professional circuit, I suppose it’s not too bad!

***

Choristers spend their entire careers being looked at by someone – well, at least, we hope so. Even though we may not be the focus all the time, we know that someone sitting out there in the theatre will be checking each of us out at some point during a show. I don’t have the best eyesight without my glasses on but I love having a discreet peek when I get the opportunity – a ‘checking out the audience’ sideways glance when I’m not really meant to. I’m always interested to see how far back I can see and still make out individual members of the public. It’s great when a colleague comes up to you onstage and whispers, ‘Guide dog in the third row, prompt side. So cute. Check him out if you can.’ Of course, you can’t ignore such an invitation – that would be rude – so you find yourself, at the earliest opportunity, checking out the adorable audience member and passing the news along. During one show, we heard a rumour backstage: ‘Dustin Hoffman in Row G.’ So of course, we all started counting from A to G, then slowly scanning the row until we spotted him. To top the evening off, he very kindly came backstage to meet the cast and crew. Depending on the production, this detective work may have to be done over several scenes, because you can’t just hang out down the front of the stage until you’ve spotted the person of interest. That would be highly unprofessional!

Backstage, there are several small monitors that project a camera onto the conductor. The camera used to achieve this is a little wider than the space where the conductor stands, so we are usually able to see three or four people behind the conductor, as well as four or five people in the second row. It’s hugely entertaining to watch these monitors and spot a person who has fallen asleep, then see them instantly awoken when a singer sings a high note or the orchestra plays loudly. Some might have their eyes closed due to the sheer beauty of what they are listening to, but you can tell those who have entered that deeper slumber, hunched over the person next to them or about to fall out of their seat.

It’s not always easy to gauge an audience’s response during a performance. It’s not until a curtain call that you get an indication of whether they’ve enjoyed it or not. And I always hope that the audience are mostly oblivious to what’s happening onstage beyond what they are seeing in front of them. But, potential mishaps and inside jokes aside, we always walk out onto that stage to take the audience on a journey, to give them a seamless fusion of emotion, music and storytelling – even if we do have a wee giggle along the way.