`We have to make sure what we’re doing is true–true as in life and not as in opera. The only things we have to do that with are our instruments. We don’t take them out of a case; we are our instruments. And if we do anything that isn’t true, we hurt our communication to the audience. Use the librettist’s words, but make them about yourself. You know what I’m sayin’?”
Most people know Charles Nelson Reilly as an actor and Hollywood personality: a regular on “Hollywood Squares,” the aggressively Noo Yawk voice of a second-banana mutt in “All Dogs Go to Heaven.” Fewer know that he once trained seriously for a singing career (and even made a professional debut as the Sergeant in “La Boheme”), or that he is a director of opera as well as straight theater. He is also an acting teacher–and a good one. He recently dispensed some valuable lessons to a group of young singers at a master class backstage at the Civic Opera House.
The era of stand-and-deliver singing in opera is largely a thing of the past; today’s audiences, used to television and movies, demand a much higher degree of artistic verisimilitude than traditionally was the case, and today’s opera companies, working to keep people coming to the theater, intend to give it to them. This is the second time that Reilly has worked with members of the Lyric Opera Center for American Artists, the company’s apprentice arm, and while he acknowledges that singers must keep things like musicality and breathing in mind, he insists that they can act just as well as performers who lack those constraints. It’s an aesthetic he brings to his own work. “If you direct the `Rocky Horror Show’ or you direct `La Traviata,’ it’s the same procedure. Only the material is different.”
Richard Perlman, director of the Opera Center, says he considers Reilly’s workshops valuable because “the more singers who can be persuaded to think of themselves as actors and performers whose primary job it is to communicate to the audience, the better it will be. My basic orientation is show business, and opera needs to resemble show business more–getting away from generalizations, getting away from doing things in a particular way because it’s received information, rather than coming from one’s own study. Theater is as much a craft as making your vocal cords slap.”
Moreover, he notes, “(Reilly’s) classes are particularly useful because of his incredible interest in opera that acts as a leavening influence on his interest in acting. Many people who want to change the way opera singers act onstage have a problem doing that because they basically hate opera. Charles loves it and understands it, and so he works with the singers instead of against them.”
Reilly’s teaching technique relies heavily on anecdotes–of actors, singers, directors, things that happened in junior high school–and he drops names the way a maple tree drops leaves in autumn, but most of his stories make a useful point. “My dear friend Julie Harris says, `We have to be sponges, going through life picking things up, and using what we see in our work.’ ” When playing a drunk, he advises a mezzo-soprano working on “Ah, quel diner!” from Offenbach’s “La Perichole”: Don’t flail around. Be a drunk who is attempting to show that she isn’t incapacitated at all.
Reilly, who inclines toward garish cardigan sweaters and wearing hats indoors, demonstrates his points to his students: showing the mezzo how to use a chair as a prop in her aria, and suggesting that she “fall asleep” on the piano while still singing; demonstrating to a soprano how to fill the introduction to Violetta’s “scena” in the first act of “La Traviata”; telling a baritone working on “Largo al factotum,” the famous aria from “The Barber of Seville,” “It’s `Dial 1-800-FIGARO! I’m the most important person in the world!’ “
Most important, says Reilly, who frequently invokes the name of his own teacher, the legendary Uta Hagen, is that singers abandon the staginess that so often afflicts opera. “Opera is full of trappings that make us go away from being human. You can’t let them do that. You can’t walk like you’re in an opera! You have to make it real. You have to just be there. You get what I’m sayin’? . . .
“If you’re entering a room for the first time, do it the way you would in life–look around, see how they have the furniture arranged. If your character is meeting another character for the first time, meet them the way you would in life.
“When we come onstage, we have to find the words for the first time. Frank Sinatra in performance is exciting, because even though he’s singing the same old songs, it’s as though he’s finding those words for the first time, choosing to say `I get no kick from champagne,’ instead of, oh, `bourbon.’ You can do that and still be where the composer wants you to be. Did you listen to (bass) Sam Ramey last night (in `Faust’)? Wasn’t he wonderful? He was wonderful because he was just there; he was wonderful because he led with the words.”
Reilly zeros in on a common pitfall of operatic performance: the tendency, when one is not actually singing oneself, to think of other things–one’s next entrance, one’s next aria, how quickly one is likely to get out of the parking lot after the final curtain–instead of listening to the other people on stage. “In the second act of `Tosca,’ the soprano sings her wonderful aria while Scarpia sits–but “Vissi d’arte” is Scarpia’s aria, too, if he chooses to listen, really listen.”
The singer can grab the audience with the simplest of devices, if they’re well thought out, Reilly maintains. He mentions a Tosca who folded her cape into a pillow as she sang her last words, then held it over her face as she jumped from the parapet–to save the diva’s famous features from being destroyed on the pavement below; he talks about a Carmen who mesmerized her Don Jose and the audience during the “Habanera” just by the way she played with the combs in her hair–“We have to find the combs in every part we play.
“Look at the music: it’s black and white. The notes are there, the words are there. The composer supplies the black; we have to supply the white. Everything has to be from our life. You hear what I’m sayin’? It’s really very simple.”
