Super Days and Nights

It strikes me that being a supernumerary in a small role can be the best job at the opera. You're not just a face in the crowd, but you're not the scene's focus, and of course, you don't have to sing. In his five roles so far with San Francisco Opera, Christopher Smith (see end of August 31 post) has had a super career.

He had "a great role" in the June 2009 production of Puccini's Tosca, for instance. The opera's villain is Baron Scarpia, the corrupt chief of police of Rome, and the entire second act takes place in his quarters, as Scarpia tries to learn the whereabouts of an escaped political prisoner; has Tosca's lover, Cavaradossi, tortured offstage; and attempts to seduce Tosca in exchange for Cavaradossi's life. Christopher was one of Scarpia's six henchmen: "My job was to look mean in the background." (Though he doesn't look so mean above, in the foreground, right).

And then, toward the end of Act III, he was in the firing squad for the "mock" execution.

That summer, Christopher also played a policeman in a rare staging of George and Ira Gershwin's 1935 opera Porgy and Bess (not to be confused with the movie). The seven performances sold out, and "there was so much excitement with that opera, onstage and in the audience." I can vouch for that. The hum and buzz continued after the curtain dropped and we we left the opera house: The staging, acting, singing, and dancing were stellar. I want to mention that the director was Francesca Zambello, because she is directing next summer's Ring Cycle as well.

Oh, and Christopher may well be performing in at least one of the four operas, reprising his roles in Die Walkure, the opera that started all the excitement--I mean my excitement--this past summer. (See July 22 post.)

By the way, from now on when you click on a link to an opera--here, it's Tosca, Porgy and Bess, and Die Walkure--you'll open onto a YouTube clip from a performance. So: music!

Word of the Day: Supernumerary

Those of you who don't think opera overlaps with popular culture have not been watching Mad Men. Or am I the only one who remembers a conversation Don Draper had in an elegant restaurant in the first of this season's episodes, when he was on a blind date with a young woman who told him she was a supernumerary at the Met? She explained that her task was to help fill the stage. "I do a lot of mock drinking," she told him. "I've been a wench, a courtesan, part of a harem.... I love the costumes and the music." In other words, she's part of a crowd and doesn't sing.

When she asked if he'd ever been to the opera, he said, "Only for business, so I've never enjoyed it." (So Don Draper: does he enjoy anything?) She invited him to a performance, of course, saying although they don't get paid, "they give the supers tickets."

At San Francisco Opera, the supers do get paid, a bit: $6 for each "out-of-house," or staging, rehearsal; $11 for every onstage dress rehearsal and performance. For Aida, the season opener, the supers will attend about ten staging rehearsals and five onstage rehearsals, and they'll be in 12 performances. That means the 19 men and 14 women who fit the costumes (that's how supers are usually selected) will earn about $250 each, plus two tickets to the final dress rehearsals for any operas they are in.

Aida is surely one of the operas that gave rise to the more colloquial name for supernumeraries, which is: spear carriers. (The local supers' newsletter is at spearheadnews.com.) You always see plenty of exotic-looking spear carriers in Aida's famous processional scene, with its stirring music and more or less Egyptian-style costumes. British fashion designer Zandra Rhodes created the sets and costumes for this "eye-popping production," from Houston Grand Opera. Just scroll back and look at the photo.

Christopher Smith, a super I met at the Werther casting call (see August 17 post), will be the one in the jackel-head, or Anubis, costume. He tells me supers usually get to wear two costumes per opera. For Aida, he says, he's "mostly in miniskirts and body paint"--not all that different from what he wore a few years ago in his first SFO production, Mozart's Idomeneo. In other words, "I feel mostly nekkid." (He's from Kentucky, and every once in a while exhibits a bit of a twang that sounds like the characters' in the FX channel's Justified.) But that's OK, because at least in the processional scene, "we come in real quick and we're off." Costume change!