Have Arias, Will Travel

By JAY COCKS

A Texas touring company finds opera a home on the road

Faint hearts need not apply. That goes for fatties too: a brochure declares proudly that there are "no two-ton Teutons in our company." Still, it takes more than just a strong voice and a presentable shape to join up with the Texas Opera Theater.

A certain amount of vigor is required to get through the Houston-based company's long days; counting time for travel, set assembling and performances, the crew can work as many as 20 hours on a day when the main company is on the road. And it will be traveling for twelve weeks of this 36-week season, in which TOT is scheduled to give 233 performances in 57 cities, towns and hamlets. A tolerance for long bus rides and fast-food joints is also helpful. Yes, TOT members should have a deep love of opera. But they also must not recoil at the idea of performing La Boheme on the gym floor of the junior high in Eagle Pass, Texas, or changing costumes in the bathrooms in the lobby of the high school in Show Low, Ariz. New recruits are advised to keep their voices in shape and their pioneer spirits ready; they will need both for the next publicity appearance at a shopping mall or an upcoming condominium dedication.

Sex appeal does not hurt either. It never does, of course, but it turns out to be especially practical when performers are sent to melt hearts and open wallets at the local Lions Club, or to strut and sing their stuff in front of thousands of noisily skeptical fans before the start of a game at the Astrodome. "We'll get in any door we can," says Jane Weaver, 33, TOT managing director. "We have to be flexible enough to play in a high school gym as well as a 2,000-seat auditorium." That frequently exercised adaptability, says Baritone Robert Galbraith, one of TOT'S standout voices, is "the wonderful thing about us. We can take opera anywhere."

It is wonderful that TOT can do this. It is perhaps even more wonderful that its members want to, and are willing to put up with almost any touring mishap and slap-happy road-company misfortune in order to let people in places far from regular opera companies sample a little Puccini or get a glimpse of Rossini's Cinderella. In characteristic down-home fashion, a TOT invitation for that work urges, "Come see Cinderella win out over her two grasping stepsisters. Come see her wed the handsome Prince." Notes the Houston Grand Opera's general director, David Gockley: "Opera tends to be a stilted, exotic, expensive kind of entertainment that rules out a great deal of the population." Gockley founded TOT in 1974 precisely to break down the high-falutin image that opera still has in the boonies, as well as to create a training ground for emerging talent.

The best of the young performers -- all but one of the singers are under 30 -- can expect to join other TOT-trained artists who have gone on to big-city companies, which do not hire inexperienced singers. Says Philadelphia-born Conductor Louis Salemno, 28, explaining why he joined TOT: "It's all in your head until you get a chance. They gave me a chance. At Chicago's Lyric Opera, they want Toscanini."

With a performance early this week in Austin, the company winds up a 29-day swing through 18 cities and towns in Texas, Oklahoma and Louisiana. Among the stops: Temple, Stillwater, San Marcos, Eagle Pass, Seguin and Harlingen. At times on such jaunts, a TOT engagement looks less like a brush with Parnassus than a rest stop at Parris Island. "I think it's like the Olympics," says Mezzo-Soprano Susanne Mentzer. "You have to sing, act, put on makeup and ride the bus on top of everything else." A measure of flexibility in casting is required: Galbraith sings the baritone role of Marcello in La Boheme, as well as the bass role of Dandini in Cinderella. In one week on the latest tour Tenor Carroll Freeman helped out with hair and makeup and sang two lines offstage in Boheme in Abilene, Texas, on Tuesday, and assumed the leading role of Rodolfo on Thursday, when the bus reached Lawton, Okla.

When things get truly rigorous, a certain improvisational talent comes into play. At Show Low, a tiny town (pop. 3,800) in eastern Arizona, some members of the company had to relieve themselves on the snow. Even when plumbing is provided, timing is vital. Portable toilets were installed in Lubbock, Texas, for company convenience, but they were located right inside the theater doors so that, as one TOT stalwart reports, "if you had to go during the show, you had to go during a loud part."

Loud parts do not occur with, say, Bayreuth frequency or density. The company for the latest tour included 14 singers (starting salary: $280 a week), a 23-piece orchestra, a conductor and assistant and five-member crew, all of whom have got into costume for the productions. Audience taste tends to restrict TOT'S repertory to the best-known works, which are sung in English. Says Company Manager Jim Toland, 36: "What else can you bring to someone who has never seen opera before but the great ones?" There is a little experimentation: Donizetti's Don Pasquale will be reset in modern Cuba. TOT is also limited to operas in which the chorus is not essential and which do not call for either heavy orchestration or the kind of big, heroic vocal strength that is still beyond the capacity of the company's young singers.

If these requirements are confining, no one at TOT seems to notice, or care. The company started with $35,000 from the Moody Foundation, bankrolled by the estate of a multimillionaire Texas financier; TOT's success has been so swift and sure it is now flourishing on a million-dollar budget. Some of that comes from revenues and some from grants by Texaco, Exxon, First City Bancorporation of Texas, Dresser Industries and Levi Strauss, as well as the state of Texas and the National Endowment for the Arts. This year the group comes East for the first time (stops will include Albany, Ga., Danville, Va., and Asheville, N.C.), and later may go to Alaska.

The company will, in fact, travel to almost any town that invites it. All it asks in return is a check ranging from $5,600 to $19,900 (depending on how far from the home base it must travel and what shows in the repertory are requested) and a space 35 ft. wide, 25 ft. deep and 16% ft. high. A couple of portable Johns might be nice too. -- By Jay Cocks. Reported by Anne Constable/Abilene

With reporting by Anne Constable

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