This opera lark is a weird thing. When I was writing Puddle Wonderful I talked to the librettist, James Johnson, he wrote the words, I wrote the music, there was a bit of tooing and froing between us while I was writing, it was handed to the players, conductor and director and it happened. Yes there were arguments, people annoyed at decisions that they weren’t happy about but everyone was there to do their thing as best as they can which sometimes is beyond the understand of the other people trying to do their thing, hence the arguments, but everything came together and the evenings it was performed I and everyone else couldn’t have been happier.
This time it’s completely different. Not that everyone isn’t trying to do their thing to their fullest, they are, there are just less people involved. The first performance had the ensemble, singers, conductor, director, lighting tech, marketing person, composer and librettist, this time there is the ensemble, singers, conductor and Jason, Thom and I trying to fill in for all the other rolls. So completely different and a little more weight on our inexperienced shoulders.
Today I am talking to my singers about blocking. This is something I’ve only every experienced once before, during the first performance, and it mostly consisted of me sitting at the back of the room watching and occasionally saying “yea that seems grand” because I really had no idea what was going on. This time I have to talk to the three singers about what I want it to look like, Barbara Walton, Catrin Pryce-Jones and Claire Thompson all have more experience in this area than I do! The other interesting/worrying thing is that Musa doesn’t have a stage – it is a bar/restaurant. This means I can’t simply borrow ideas from other shows I’ve seen “I want you to act like they did in act 1 of X” I have to do everything from scratch.
After a few hours of thinking, sketching and writing I’ve come up with an outline of actions, movements and general placement in the room of the singers for each bit of the piece. I’ve also solidified the characters of the singers. You might think that that should have been done long ago but because the singers are three strands of the same person they don’t have definite characters in the text, it is their movements that will give them shape. My worry with what I have come up with is that there is too much and it won’t be physically possible to do what I’ve been thinking in the time constraints of the piece but I’m hoping that the singers experience will help when I sit down with them later.