Time is the Enemy

So I've been looking back on my meager posts lately.

They all seem a little disgruntled. A little rushed. A little mournful.

And perhaps that does sum up where I'm at, but I'm noticing that they don't particularly capture what I was hoping to capture when I started this blog a year and a half ago. I wanted to really explore what this life was, what it was to live and work in the performing arts, what it was to be in this rootless job, the intricacies of putting up a show and dealing with a life that is dictated almost entirely by what you do.

It's hard to talk about all of these things without detail, and perhaps my life would have been made infinitely easier had I started this blog as an anonymous writer. But then again, my goal was never to (as my documentarian husband says) "expose the seedy underbelly of the opera business," it was to document process in all of its joys and difficulties. Because, truly, the process is the only thing that makes art worth DOING . . . for me that is.

I've become somewhat nervous to talk about difficult projects which really defeats the purpose of this blog. You can take as much from the difficult moments as you can from the joyous ones, sometimes more. Suffice to say, "Samson et Dalila" has been a difficult process, and for the same reason that most operas will claim when they are struggling to open well:

TIME.

Opera production suffers from a quickening disease. The productions are huge and lavish but the rehearsal time is painfully small. Big budgets conflicting with meager cash flow dictate that rehearsal and technical schedules be reduced to their absolute minimum. It's a frustrating truth that looms darkly over many, many productions, and it is felt in every company I've ever worked for.

Most productions go up in three weeks or less. A month of prep/rehearsal time is luxurious. This is not so in straight or musical theater. Directors who come to opera from that tradition are shocked and dismayed to get their first production calendar. Dancers work months on a ten-minute piece, musical theater gets an extensive preview period wherein they can tweak a piece until it's been drilled to near perfection. Opera starts on a Tuesday morning , and three weeks or less later the critics are there with their light pens and tiny notebooks, ready to judge.
The trick as a director/maestro/lighting designer etc, is to organize your time so effectively that you can fit everything in. Some people would say you can't be a perfectionist in this business, which I don't really agree with. I think that perfectionism works here as long as its always coupled with a severe organization (this is where my OCD ends up working for me). Everyone working on an opera has to walk in the door knowing exactly what they want and exactly what they're doing or frustrations will ensue and multiply.

For "Samson," it was tech time that was fighting. This is a difficult technical show with collapsing temples, pyro effects and a two-minute scene change that defies belief. We're finally getting there, but I am constantly amazed at how much has to be achieved in so little time.

It's the time factor that will keep most opera from ever truly achieving the slickness that we see in Broadway shows (and I'm not sure that opera should really ever go there even if it could). Don't get me wrong, to be granted more time is a luxury that any of us in the business would grab at and clamp onto like an alligator's jaws should it ever be held out towards us, but I have to say that I thrive on the race. I love that feeling after a meet-and-greet or first production meeting, as if we've all set ourselves down on a giant toboggan and then pushed ourselves over the side of an impossibly high, icy mountain. There's no stopping it once it starts. We're going to hit every tree and rock on the way down, and we're only going to get faster and faster and faster as we go. But if we reach the bottom without capsizing, then the rush, the adrenalin, the cold in our faces is the most exhilirating feeling I know.

The moment that orchestra tune rises out of the pit on opening night, no matter how many times I've banged my head against the wall, walked out of a rehearsal searching blindly for a scotch rocks, buried my head in my hands as a tech rehearsal grinds to a halt for one reason or other, I know the curtain will rise and a show (our show) will be on the other side.

It's the reason I can't even fathom doing anything else.