And many of the patrons will be much younger than the average operagoer, who is 45 or older.
Boheme will be simulcast live by satellite to 31 universities, colleges and high schools in the United States - including the N.C. School of the Arts, whose students, along with the general public, can take in the production on a movie screen at the Stevens Center.
“It’s amazing how today with technology … we can share this (opera) with so many people who couldn’t sit in only one room,” said Vittorio Grigolo, an Italian tenor who’ll play Rodolfo in the production. “For opera, it’s a great moment.”
John Scheurich sells the simulcast technology, for Staging Solutions of Houston, that will beam the show here and at such nearby schools as the UNC Chapel Hill and Duke University.
He described a “live, edited” production, in which four offstage cameras at the Kennedy Center will zoom in on everything from a baton-waving conductor to the expressions on each cast member’s face. Each location receiving the simulcast will have a producer, a projectionist and an audio operator.
NCSA joined the schools viewing the production because Shayne Doty, the Washington National Opera’s director of development, studied organ at NCSA in the 1970s and wanted his alma mater included in the mix. (The first schools that signed onto the simulcast had some kind of connection to the Washington National Opera’s board members.)
“We wanted to establish a link with NCSA,” Doty said. “We were aware that there were no conservatories represented. We thought of NCSA to offer this to.
“Also, of all the major opera companies, we’re the one that lies closest to North Carolina. We felt a kind of mission throughout the Southeast.”
Admission to next Sunday’s Boheme is free. Washington National Opera’s board has underwritten the entire cost of a $750,000 effort aimed at attracting new patrons and/or reaching audiences that might not otherwise attend a live performance. Similar simulcast productions are planned.
“It’s an investment we’re making,” said Steve Blair, the Washington’s director of marketing and audience services. “You can advertise and can try and get … wonderful press about a production. But it really is people coming and enjoying it and bringing someone else.”
Blair said that focus groups revealed to him that many patrons of Washington National Opera first experienced opera when they were teenagers and “have gravitated toward it ever since,” especially if they “had someone mentoring them” in the process.
Washington National Opera is aiding in that “mentoring,” having encouraged schools to incorporate educational materials about its Boheme into curriculums. Find them at www.dc-opera.org.
In addition, the production, to be directed by a Polish film director named Mariusz Trelinski, is trying to “make … Puccini’s story relevant to a new generation,” production notes say. A young cast will sing and act not in a 19th-century Parisian garret but in “a sleek, glass loft in an unspecified city” of modern times.
“Treslinski’s production could take place anywhere,” the notes say. “The director has said that Boheme is about growing up, and his production lets today’s audiences apply their own life experiences to the story.”
The technology for simulcasts has been around since the 1990s. Houston Grand Opera says it became the first American opera company to “project a live performance of an opera to an outside venue,” in 1995. Thousands saw that simulcast, of Rossini’s La Cenerentola, in the Fish Plaza, which is just outside the Wortham Theater Center, where Houston Grand Opera productions are presented.
A couple of years ago, Washington National Opera led the way in presenting simulcasts in locations farther way from an opera company’s main venue. Some of its productions have been broadcast on the National Mall.
Satellite technology now enables the same production to be seen at multiple sites around the world. Last season, for example, six of the Metropolitan Opera’s productions were seen in 118 movie theaters in the United States, Canada and Great Britain, Playbill reported.
With its production of Boheme, Washington National Opera is attempting something similar. But its effort is being billed as “an educational initiative” and costs audiences nothing. Admission is charged for the Met simulcasts.
Tenor Grigolo didn’t seem a bit fazed about singing for an audience that’s potentially 30 times larger than the one he encounters in an opera house.
“My psychology, when I’m on stage, is to feel alive and to feel the emotions of what I’m singing,” he said. “If I’m singing for one thousand or one million, it’s the same. I’m giving them the same. I don’t want to give more; I don’t want to give less. It’s always the passion inside me. This cannot change.”
Washington National Opera’s production of Puccini’s La Boheme will be simulcast live at 2 p.m. next Sunday in the Stevens Center. The performance is free and open to the public, but tickets are required. Call 336-721-1945.
Source:Relish
