Mozart, a Maid, and Dave Matthews

So I was at the opera house one afternoon, watching a dress rehearsal for The Marriage of Figaro, when I saw someone emerge from the wings far downstage--just a step or two. I assumed he was going to sing, until I noticed his jeans and polo shirt. He quickly adjusted one of the props, but that was it: This was the final run-through before opening night, so there were no dramatic glitches or performance-stopping do-overs, just pure entertainment at less than the price of a standing-room seat. (See August 31 post.)

I was sitting amid a group of high school students from the city's School of the Arts, who whooped and cheered after every aria and laughed heartily at all the funny bits. Figaro is the great sit-com of the opera world--all multiple deceptions and misunderstandings, as the servants Figaro and Susanna try to marry while avoiding the lecherous Count Almaviva, who wants to bed any maid he fancies, while breaking the Countess's heart--all to Mozart's wonderful music.

Later, students from this school and the San Francisco Conservatory of Music met with the woman who sang Susanna, soprano Danielle de Niese. You want to hate her: absolutely beautiful, lovely voice, fine comic actress ("You don't play the character from the neck up"), and she can't be much over 30. When she came into the room, she was so up. For one thing, she'd heard all that whooping and whistling. "Your response was just stunning," she exclaimed. "The premiere audience won't be like you guys. Now we're spoiled."

De Niese told her audience that Figaro is a great "starter opera," because "it's so funny" and, she did not say, light. It can be warm and human and even moving, but it's far less taxing for an audience than any of Wagner's librettos. It's a noticeable workout, though, for anyone singing Susanna, who is onstage for all but about 30 minutes: "When I took off my wig, I had the sweatiest hair ever! You're always singing at top soprano; you're in almost every ensemble; and your aria is at the end. I try to set up some timing where I can jump offstage and swig some water. I'm always looking for new ways to pace myself, new ways to rest."

Someone asked De Niese how she warms up. "Some people don't like to use their voice before they sing," she said, "but I talk to my parents all morning." (The woman is so vivacious, it was truly no surprise to hear this.) "Before a performance, I would like 45 minutes to focus.... I listen to my iPod and hum along"--to Dave Matthews Band, Coldplay, Beyonce, Katy Perry's new album--"Music is the thing that punctuates emotion. It's important to be open to music."

"It drives my dressers crazy," she added, "because I always have my earbuds in."

Background music: Scenes from SFO's Marriage of Figaro

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!