Every opera singer has had the following nightmare: You’re backstage at the opera house. It should feel routine but on this night you can’t quite shake the nagging suspicion that something is wrong. Stagehands are swirling around you. You can hear playing from the orchestra pit. A sense of unease begins to creep over you. You’re called into position in the wings. The curtain opens. The unease becomes a knot in the pit of your stomach. The stage manager cues your entrance. You walk onstage. The maestro motions toward you. You open your mouth but your mind is blank. The maestro’s motions become frantic. You know you’re supposed to be singing but you stand there frozen. The prompter is hissing out cues at breakneck speed. Three thousand pairs of eyes are trained on you. At that moment you realize what’s wrong: you don’t know the opera.
Or you were prepared to sing The Barber of Seville and the orchestra is playing Lohengrin. Or you thought you were singing a bit part but it turns out you’re the lead. Or you thought tonight was a rehearsal not a performance.
I don’t know if mezzo-soprano Elena Obraztsova had nightmares when she did the role of Prince Orlofsky in Die Fledermaus for the first time. But she should have. It was 2003, and Elena was in the sunset of a very fine career. Orlofsky would be one of the last roles she would learn. Or rather, almost learn.
On paper it looked good. Plácido Domingo asked me to create a new production for his company, Washington Opera. But things got off to a rocky start. The version we were doing had a ton of English dialogue — and Elena, I knew, had a little difficulty speaking English. On top of that, she had to miss the first two weeks of the rehearsal period — a huge chunk — in order to oversee her vocal competition in her native Russia. When I heard the news I nervously remarked, “But there is so much dialogue!”
“Don’t worry,” her agent assured me. “She has learned every word.” That’s when I knew for sure that I was screwed.
There wasn’t much I could do about it. Besides, I had other problems. Plácido had cast two lovely young women in the key roles of Rosalinde and Adele. While shapely, they weren’t quite right for the parts. To begin with, neither could speak English with the facility demanded by the dialogue. On top of that, neither had the right personality — the je ne sais quoi — that makes Die Fledermaus sparkle with wit and charm. Their chief qualification for getting cast seemed to be that they had won Plácido’s vocal competition. Plácido tends to have a great deal of affection for the winners of his competition.
This might not have been such a big deal, but at the last minute a telecast was arranged. Less-than-stellar casting for a live performance in front of four thousand people was one thing. For a broadcast that would reach hundreds of thousands it was quite another. Plácido arranged to have June Anderson take over as Rosalinde, and moved his contest winner to a guest spot during the party scene. The lovely young lady didn’t protest too much — her part got a lot smaller, but her fee stayed the same. For whatever reason, Plácido didn’t see fit to replace the Adele as well. Considering the otherwise veteran cast, which also included Wolfgang Brendel, this young lady, frankly, was getting overshadowed. Explaining all of this to the artistic administrator, Christina Scheppelmann, I asked for Ms. Overshadowed to be replaced by the cover artist, who seemed better suited to the role. “You’ll have to get Plácido to sign off on this,” she said. Fine.
After some back and forth, he finally relented. “Oh, by the way,” he said, “I’m leaving town tomorrow. Could you break the news to her?” I wasn’t entirely comfortable with the idea — it wasn’t my company. We agreed that Christina would deliver the news and I would help to smooth things over. We set an appointment for the next day at my apartment. Ms. Overshadowed arrived promptly. Christina did not. Hung out to dry, I had no choice but to explain the facts of life myself. Christina, in a demonstration of exquisite timing, arrived the moment I finished. The cover artist ended up going on.
Otherwise, the production was shaping up nicely. The party scene of Die Fledermaus usually includes “surprise guests,” and Plácido had arranged for the Russian ambassador and his wife to make a big entrance. Even more impressively, he got three Supreme Court justices — Stephen Breyer, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and Anthony Kennedy — to make an appearance. I got them for exactly one rehearsal, and we worked out a bit where they made a flashy entrance in their robes, introduced as the “Supremes.” Ginsburg, a rabid opera fan, was particularly charming. While she was a tad nervous about being onstage, she was more concerned about leaving her seat for even a minute. “Oh, Mr. Mansouri,” she asked repeatedly, “will I miss anything?”
The last piece of the puzzle would be Elena, who had finally arrived. Do I even need to say that she didn’t know so much as a single word of the dialogue? And here we were only a week from opening night! I worked with her frantically, but the clock was ticking. It was time to resort to extraordinary measures. The obvious answer was cue cards, and these began to sprout up all over the set, attached to plants, furniture, and so forth. Orlofsky is seldom far from his champagne so I even had the prop master find the largest champagne flute available — to accommodate not the bubbly but rather dialogue cards. Even this wasn’t getting us anywhere. For the “Champagne Aria,” one of the highlights of the opera, Elena spent the whole time not toasting but rather staring into her champagne flute frantically trying to follow the lyrics. Evidently Elena had as much difficulty reading English as speaking English.
Thank God for the Austrian baritone Peter Edelmann, son of the legendary bass Otto Edelman, who was playing Dr. Falke. Smart and genial, he learned all of Orlofsky’s dialogue, just in case. If Elena ever missed a cue, he could step in with a chuckle, saying, “Oh, your highness! Weren’t you going to say …” or “Oh, your highness! I know what you’re going to ask me …” and then finish her lines for her. It was an imperfect solution, but Edelmann, with his boundless good nature and Viennese charm, was just the person to pull it off.
Elena, apparently, was less than thrilled with this arrangement. She went to Plácido and told him that she couldn’t go on without a prompter. Normally this wouldn’t have been a terribly unusual request. But we were performing at Constitution Hall, a venerable venue that had neither a prompter’s box nor the room for one. Elena, however, was not to be dissuaded. The technical department obligingly jury-rigged something at the front of the stage. Even with a prompter, the difficulties continued. The prompter would cue a line and Elena would stop and say, “Prompt slower! Prompt slower!” The prompter’s cues slowed to a crawl. Evidently Elena had as much trouble hearing English as she did speaking and reading it.
By then, ticket demand was reaching fever pitch. After we sold out the run, we decided to open up the final dress rehearsal. A capacity crowd of nearly four thousand people showed up. Things were going reasonably smoothly, though Elena’s lines had an off-kilter rhythm. Much of her dialogue was preceded by a pause as the prompter drawled out the cue, followed by a moment for Elena to digest what she had heard, followed by actual speech. Thankfully, Die Fledermaus is a frothy comedy and the audience was in a good mood.
Finally we got to the end, when all of the shenanigans of the preceding acts are revealed. Falke starts to explain, saying, “Your highness, I promise you are going to laugh …”
Orlofsky interrupts, retorting, “You are right, Falke. I am going to laugh.” At which point he lets out a peal of raucous laughter — indicated in the score by a simple HA HA HA — providing the final cue of the evening. With that raucous laughter, everyone onstage likewise begins to laugh and the orchestra starts up the concluding bit of effervescent music. That’s how it’s supposed to end. Nothing can happen without that cue: the soloists, chorus, maestro, orchestra, and stage manager are all waiting for it. And for once no one could help Elena. She and she alone had to tie a ribbon on the evening. Peter delivered the set-up line perfectly and everyone onstage looked to Orlofsky expectantly. All we needed was one last line. But by this point, Elena’s tenuous relationship with the English language had been taxed to the limit. Everything came to a grinding halt, and the hall filled with a pronounced silence. The prompter did her job, supplying words slowly, one at a time, waiting for Elena to recall and speak the line. That never happened. And so this is what the audience in Constitution Hall heard coming from the prompter’s box:
“Yooouuu …”
(Silence)
“Arrre …”
(Silence)
“Riiiiiiiiiiight …”
(Silence)
“Faaalke …”
(Silence)
“I …”
(Silence)
“Aaammm …”
(Silence)
“Goooiiing …”
(Silence)
“Tooo …”
(Silence)
“Laaaugh.”
By this point the audience was responding to each drawled out word with a burst of giggles. After yet another pause, with no raucous laughter from Elena, the prompter dutifully continued.
“HA …”
(Silence)
“HA …”
(Silence)
“HA …”
The crowd exploded into hysterics as I massaged my forehead. I needn’t have worried. It turned out that everyone thought I had contrived the whole thing. For the umpteenth time in my career a blunder was construed as a touch of directorial genius on my part. And for the umpteenth time in my career I happily kept my mouth shut.