This they knew:
”It`s gonna be hot in there.”
”We`re gonna suffocate.”
Tnot quite tall enough to see over the seat in front of you. Especially when they sing the darn thing in some language you`ve never even heard of, let alone just plain heard before.
Such were the travails of Room 308 from Swift Grammar School last week as they shuffled-and pushed and occasionally jerked to a halt, for no reason other than to trip up everyone behind them-down the sidewalk from their Edgewater public school to the auditorium of Mundelein College of Loyola University, Lake Shore Campus. The 6th graders were on their way to the opera, a performance of the Lincoln Opera to be precise. Jacques Offenbach`s 19th Century ”The Tales of Hoffmann,” in French, to be very precise.
As has been the practice of the small Chicago-based opera company for six years, every time the Lincoln stages a production (usually three times a year), it includes a couple of children`s performances-cut down to one hour each, the maximum sitting-semi-still time for kids 8 to 14-in an artistic effort to broaden the network of aria nuts, young, old and in between.
It is not every opera company that takes on such a challenge. (Can you imagine belting out 10 minutes of coloratura in front of 800 squiggling younguns, all of whom have mastered the fine art of if-
there`s-anything-under-the-seat-with-which-to-make-strange-sounds-you- can-bet-they`ll-discover-it-with-their-feet-or-some-other-body-part?)
But then not every opera company has one Babs Lieberman, as passionate an opera lecturer as can be found in these parts.
The Opera Lady
A Gold Coast resident who says her own children grew up calling Luciano Pavarotti ”Uncle Louie” as he gave them piggyback rides around her house, Lieberman has lectured for the Lyric Opera of Chicago and the San Francisco Opera. But it is for the much-less-known Lincoln Opera that she volunteers hours and hours of her time, trekking from school to school all around Chicago introducing very young ears to the very vocal world of Verdi, Puccini and friends.
This time around, the subject was ”The Tales of Hoffmann.” But she has dared to take on ”Madama Butterfly,” ”Lucia di Lammermoor” and ”The Magic Flute” in the past. ”La Boheme” will be in the lesson plans this spring, when the Lincoln Opera wraps up its season with a staging of Puccini`s great tragedy at the end of April and the beginning of May at the Mundelein College auditorium.
About a month and a half before the performances, Lieberman sends a letter to every public grade school from Oak Street to the city`s northern edge and whatever private and parochial schools she digs out of North Side phone books, announcing the performance dates and offering to come to school ahead of time to tell the children the story of the opera and let them listen to some of the songs. Many of the schools are in some of the city`s poorest neighborhoods, and opera is not on the required learning list. When she first started as Lincoln`s volunteer director of education, Lieberman mailed letters to just a few schools; now she licks more than 50 envelopes.
”There`s a detachable portion at the bottom of the letter that no one ever pays attention to, so I get on the phone. The bills are astronomical,”
says the seemingly indefatigable Opera Lady, as she has come to be known by hundreds of kids from Cabrini-Green to Uptown.
(She once was shopping at Water Tower Place when a young boy from Cabrini ran up, grabbed her coattail and asked loudly, ”Hey, aren`t you the Opera Lady?” Turned out she`d taught the boy about ”Carmen” the year before at the Byrd School near Cabrini, and he remembered her. He went on to tell her he didn`t like it when Carmen died at the end. ”I was so excited, I took him and his big brother for hamburgers at the McDonald`s,” she recalls, still beaming.)
Once the schools sign up (it costs $2 a student for each ticket), Lieberman maps out her plan of attack, arms herself with a canvas tote that bulges with a boom box, tapes and a stack of index cards scribbled with notes on each character of each opera, then heads out to convert an army of opera virgins into aficionados-or at least kids who won`t giggle their way through the fat lady`s singing.
”They`re like little sponges at this stage, 3rd grade through 8th,” she said, shortly before stepping to the chalkboard at the front of the Swift School`s cavernous assembly hall, where some 140 students got an introduction to ”Hoffmann” the week before they would hear two of its acts sung on stage. ”If kids don`t know the story, they won`t pay attention. They get fidgety,” she said. If she does her job right, she said, ”you can hear a pin drop.”
She boils down each opera to the basics: good guys, bad guys, basic plot. She tries to teach the tongue-twisting characters` names, but that is usually a risky proposition because for many of her inner-city students English isn`t their primary language, and a Vietnamese, Spanish or-recently-Romanian interpreter is sometimes required.
Many of the kids get hooked on these tales ”where everyone ends up dropping dead,” as one 11-year-old put it.
Since even $2 is a lot for most of these kids to pay for the luxury of learning opera, some of the schools have devised schemes for drumming up funds. The dog and cat wash in somebody`s basement is Lieberman`s favorite. The young scrubbers make enough money each time around to rent a school bus and pay for tickets.
Young critics
Once back in the classroom, after they`ve watched their first curtain fall, Lieberman encourages the students to write new endings to the opera, and to feel free to report back to her what they liked or didn`t like about the opera.
A few years ago when ”La Boheme” was on the ticket, she warned kids:
”Bring your handkerchiefs, and you big football players, don`t be embarrassed if you sniffle at the end.”
A few months later, she got this letter, presumably from a big football player: ”Dear Mrs. Lieberman. I DID NOT CRY WHEN MIMI DIED!!!!!!”
Sitting in the dark before last week`s performance of ”Hoffmann,” 12-year-old Jorge Nieves didn`t need to sneak a peek at the Victor Book of the Operas, the opera world`s equivalent of Cliffs Notes. He was sure he had a handle on this French tale of love lost time and time and time again.
”It`s about this guy Hoffmann,” Nieves began, cocky in his cultural ways. ”He`s at a bar. He`s waiting for his girlfriend who`s at work. Then he gets drunk, and when she sees him drunk at the bar, she dumps him.”
`They always die`
”That is not how it went,” insisted Yordanos Abraham, 11, though she couldn`t remember whether Hoffmann was the good guy or the bad guy.
”Really, every girl Hoffmann gets, something happens,” explained Irvin Duffy III, an 11-year-old who claimed he had no such experience with the opposite sex. ”One left, one died and like the one in the middle, she breaks into pieces. He loses three girlfriends in this picture.”
”What I like is, opera doesn`t end like other stories where they live happily ever after. They always die. I like that,” said Jennifer Oviedo, 11. Almost an hour later, halfway through the performance, her eyelids starting to flutter and close, she whispered, ”It feels like you`re in your bedroom trying to sleep.”
But when it was over, three lost loves later, Oviedo, who unlike several classmates never did drift off to sleep, proclaimed: ”I`ll give it five stars because of the voice.”
Not everyone is so easily won over. ”Boring,” came the vote from the boy sitting just in front of Oviedo. He was going home to listen to what he called ”real music.”
That, he explained, comes in the form of M.C. Lyte, his favorite rap singer.
