A month ago I had the pleasure of participating in my first production of a college opera.. The Opera Workshop performed Puccini’s Suor Angelica on November 18th and 19th. As a lowly freshman, I was merely part of the opera’s chorus of nuns, but I found the entire production a great learning experience, and it was especially cool to work with Maestro Maurice Perress. Because these performances were in the same week as my SING performance, I found that seeing the opera slowly being put together was comparable to putting the musical together as well.

This experience has taught me the importance of knowing your productions very well. With every production that you’re in, whether it’s an opera, an oratorio, or a Broadway musical, knowing the material backwards and forwards is the secret to enjoyment of your performance and creating a memorable, heartfelt story.

I cite the many rehearsals for this production as an example. We had probably twenty of them from start to finish, and of many different varieties. Some were reading through the complex Italian words, most were going through the chorus parts on the piano, towards the end there were lots of orchestra rehearsals, but the one I feel was the most beneficial was the one where we watched the opera first. I now understand why Professor Smaldone had us watch Don Giovanni before we went to see it at the Met. Filmed productions of operas with subtitles capture every facial expression and every word that seats in the nosebleed section of the Met can’t capture. In terms of rehearsing for an opera, seeing the emotions portrayed by others helps you empathize and get into character, even if it is just “learning by imitation.”

All those rehearsals paid off, though, tedious or not. The finale of the opera, where the statue of the Virgin Mary comes alive (similar to the statue of Donna Anna’s father in Don Giovanni) and reveals to Suor Angelica her son, is the only time I’ve cried while performing, so much so that I wasn’t able to sing. Singing from the balcony seats at the opera’s finale allowed me to watch the opera as an audience member- I saw everything that we spent hours in rehearsals for: the reason why we sang certain passages again and again, the reason why the singers playing Suor Angelica marked their performances during rehearsal: it was all building up to that pivotal moment where Suor Angelica, in a fit of agony, hallucination, relief, bliss, and hysteria, sees her son. As opera will have it, he appears at the exact moment the orchestra can’t crescendo any louder, and a spotlight is shone, hitting his golden hair just right (note: her son is actually played by a she). In the production, I was a nameless nun, but I felt all the pain of Suor Angelica, and that is another reason that reinforced my wanting to be a director and playwright. I want to be the god that created that beautiful moment onstage.