Like Mme. Flora, the fake clairvoyant she portrays in Gian Carlo Menotti`s opera, ”The Medium,” Mignon Dunn is a practiced survivor.
”This is my 33rd year at the Metropolitan Opera, for God`s sake!”
exclaims the mezzo-soprano from Memphis as she settles her ample 5-foot, 9-inch frame onto a sofa in the apartment of Alan Stone, Chicago Opera Theater`s artistic director. Sharing the sofa with her are Stone and Richard Pearlman, director of opera at the Eastman School of Music, who will stage the Menotti work for COT.
”The Medium” will conclude Chicago Opera Theater`s 1992 season in six performances June 12 to 24 in Lund Auditorium, Rosary College, 7900 W. Division St., River Forest. Kurt Klipstatter, who is married to Dunn, will conduct both the Menotti and its companion work, Dominick Argento`s comic monologue, ”A Waterbird Talk,” starring baritone Robert Orth.
Given her adventuresome nature, it is perfectly reasonable for Dunn-who has sung every major mezzo-soprano role from Amneris in ”Aida” to Waltraute in the ”Ring” at the Met, Lyric Opera and other leading theaters-to want to take on something different in the Indian summer of her career.
Hence, her first go-round as Mme. Flora (a.k.a. Baba), the aging spiritualist whose sudden brush with the supernatural-or was it merely her alcohol-soaked imagination working overtime?-sends ”The Medium” hurtling to its tragic denouement.
These ”Medium” performances represent something of a reunion for Dunn and Stone, longtime friends who got their start in the mid-1950s singing on cruise ships as members of the Skyliners vocal quartet (the other singers were Chester Ludgin and William Wildermann).
On stage Dunn`s large, dramatic voice has always seemed to find its natural expression in the grand gesture. Realizing this, Stone asked her over lunch several years ago if there were any big dramatic parts she would consider singing with COT. Without hesitating, she suggested Baba in ”The Medium.” Before the check had arrived, it was a Dunn deal.
”I`m really excited to do this opera here for the first time-it`s pure theater,” the singer says. ”Three years ago I was with Gian Carlo at the Spoleto Festival and I told him I was dying to sing the part. He said, `Oh, you would make a vun-derful Baba.` ” Dunn had no trouble turning down a chance to accompany the Met tour of ”Un Ballo in Maschera” to Seville`s Expo `92 because of her COT commitment.
”I have always been crazy about Chicago. And how many more Ulricas can you do?”
Apart from their great inner strength, Dunn sees no similarities between herself and the antiheroine she will portray at Chicago Opera Theater.
”I admire Baba`s strength, but I don`t try to make her sympathetic. She will do anything to survive. We have all known people like her. People who have led terribly hard and even sordid lives get very cynical and selfish. They want to cheat people before they themselves are cheated.”
Pearlman (who directed COT`s ”La Finta Giardiniera” several seasons ago) finds certain parallels between the character Dunn plays and Norma Desmond, the aging silent-film star portrayed by Gloria Swanson in Billy Wilder`s ”Sunset Boulevard.”
”All the way through the opera you are filled with contradictory feelings about this woman, Baba,” he explains. ”In many ways she`s a total monster, yet at the end you admire her for one reason, and that is because she`s a survivor. Unfortunately, it`s her delusions that allow her to survive.”
The success of ”The Medium” in 1947 on Broadway, where it occupied a double bill with Menotti`s buffa, ”The Telephone,” became a kind of mixed blessing for the composer. On one hand, it established Menotti as a serious composer with a popular touch. On the other, it branded him (at least in the opinion of certain critics) as a purveyor of facile, simplistic sentiment, of which ”The Medium” seemed to have more than its share.
Despite this verdict, or perhaps because of it, the opera was branded a
”shabby little shocker” (to borrow Joseph Kerman`s famous view of
”Tosca”) and found a haven in a number of university and semiprofessional opera companies. Its image as a workshop piece meant that ”people did not give it the credence it deserved,” Stone believes.
His association with Menotti goes back to the 1973 world premiere here of his opera ”Tamu-Tamu,” for which he served as casting director.
”It`s easy to turn `The Medium` into a shabby little shocker when you have so many productions that just seize upon the obvious,” contends Pearlman. ”I don`t think it has the sort of mythic, Jungian levels of
`Parsifal` or anything like that, and there`s no use pretending it does. But it`s a good story, well told, and I think there is something in that.”
Pearlman also has enjoyed a long association with Menotti, having staged
”The Medium” at Aspen and for the Washington Opera.
The Menotti work represents both a terrific acting challenge and a logical repertory addition for Dunn, who has spent the better part of her remarkable career singing mostly old, nasty and scheming characters in opera. Mezzo-sopranos, unlike prima donna sopranos, seldom are allowed to be glamorous, and they seldom, if ever, get the tenor. But there is a big reward to being the perpetual second banana.
”We really get to sing the best parts, you know,” says Dunn, still the best of the American bunch after nearly four decades on the professional stage. ”You just have to figure out the reasons why these women are such bitches.”
Dunn has come a very long way from 1955, when co-founder Carol Fox paid her $100 a performance to sing utility mezzo roles in the second season of what was then called Lyric Theatre. Dunn grabbed at the chance. That, you will recall, was at a time when the major American houses were lavishing their plum roles on foreign singers. Dunn did not return to the Lyric roster until 1975, when she was long since an established international star.
She still studies with her longtime teacher, Armen Boyagian, still vocalizes before every rehearsal and performance. Most everyone agrees she is singing as well as ever. Dunn offers a simple explanation for her vocal longevity: ”I take care of my voice. I have moments when I sound like a goat, but in general I`m in pretty good shape. I haven`t lost the top of my voice but the bottom has gotten richer (because) I`m just singing more things that are lower.”
For the time being, Dunn is consolidating her assets, carefully choosing what she sings and when, taking on a few new roles like Dame Quickly in
”Falstaff” (one of the very few comedies in her repertoire) and dropping others, notably Kundry in ”Parsifal,” she finds too strenuous for the voice. Turning down certain job offers has allowed her more time for voice coaching and giving master classes at Santa Fe, the Manhattan School of Music and University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign, where her husband directs the Illinois Opera Theater and where the Klipstatters make their home.
Although Dunn says she has no timetable for retirement, she is already planning for the time when she will no longer be singing but nevertheless will want to keep her oar in opera. In recent years she has discovered she has a flair for stage direction and wants to do more. She is scheduled to direct her first ”Elektra” in 1994 for New Orleans, which also signed her to sing Klytemnestra (one of her favorite horror-harpy parts) in the same production. There`s also the siren lure of TV and the musical theater. Dunn recently taped a five-minute cameo as (what else?) an opera singer in a segment of the CBS soap, ”The Guiding Light.” She is also interested-producers, take note- in kicking up her heels in such shows as ”Sweeney Todd” and ”A Little Night Music.”
And so life may soon travel full circle for the ex-Skyliner who, when times were tough, sang the Borscht Circuit under the nom de nightclub Marianne Gray.
”There`s a whole world out there and me, well, I like to do everything,” smiles the molasses-and-grits mezzo from Tennessee. ”I am a workaholic, but that`s OK. What else am I gonna do with my old age? Play golf?”
