A New Year, A New Production

New Year's. The cold, clean air is cut by cheers from numerous stadiums as college bowl games are played out in a seemingly endless progression of television hype; whereupon, the fans come to the numbing thought that the season is over! The fever pitch of the NFL season, content with Sundays, Monday nights, and an occasional Thursday night, begins to monopolize football fans on now-vacated Saturdays; finally pundits can begin their speculation on Superbowl teams backed up by myriad statistics and not just their "gut instinct." College basketball teams, content to crush hugely inferior teams for the past two months, now turn the season toward the dreaded foes, conference opponents.

And, for those of us involved in Knoxville Opera, there comes the realization that the holidays are over and, yes, our (unmemorized) music is buried somewhere under several hundred Christmas cards and the first rehearsals of the new year are only days away.

Anyway, that was a month ago. Now, we're already a full week into staging. (One would hope that music has been memorized by now, though there are always a few laggards.) And, with the always-active staging of Carroll Freeman, comes the realization that we ate waaaaaaaayyyyy too many Christmas cookies over the holidays and are huffing and puffing about the rehearsal stage, having to make the decision between sucking in sweet oxygen to keep cell in our bodies alive or singing the choruses with appropriate gusto. Oh, well. We didn't need those brain cells anyway. We didn't lose any more than we did with a week of binge drinking our freshman year in college. Eventually, we'll start to drool out of our mouths and wonder why that's happening, but by then we'll believe that it's 1907 and we're singing in the Met chorus, doing Butterfly with Farrar, Homer, and Caruso, with Puccini himself in the audience.

Ah! Madama Butterfly. Now there's a fairly understandable plot, despite all the years that passed during the second intermission. At least Puccini used plot lines that, while rather melodramatic (Duh! It's Puccini!) and trite, were at least plausible. I would like to think that worst screenwriter in Hollywood--that is, the ones that haven't "made it" yet and, thus, are still non-union and writing--could pull together a less complex, believable, and coherent plot than the one Verdi used for Forza. One might posit that Forza's plot line is as, uh... "great" as the music to the Hymn of the Nations. At least we have the amazing plot twists that we've come to expect from Verdi to fall back on. We know, even before the curtain goes up, that the lead character is either going to unknowingly kill a sibling or child or the sibling or child will unknowingly kill them. That's a given, right? M. Knight Shyamalan should write plot twists so well. I suppose that, had UFOs and aliens been a source of discussion in mid-19th-century Italy, we'd probably be watching a Verdiesque adaptation of Signs. We'll leave that up to a future episode of The Twilight Zone or the next incarnation of Jean Cocteau to imagine.

You know, it's kind of nice to be able to work with the same director again and again. You see facets, subtleties in the various productions that you might've missed had we been on the one-opera-one-director treadmill that was previous de rigeur at KO. Carroll is, more or less, a known quantity, which is not to say that Carroll's productions are staid and predictable. I mean, it's like, over the holidays, as you're eating those previously-alluded-to Christmas cookies, you know you're thinking, "Oh, man! I'm going to pay for eating these when Carroll starts staging us at the end of January. I'll be so out of breath." Caveat emptor.