It takes a bunch of talented, skilled people that you never see or hear to pull these things off. There’s a lot going on that the audience doesn’t see. That’s what we are. We’re the people you don’t see. And we don’t want to be seen. We want to have these transitions happen and appear like magic, to some extent. Being the support role is what we do.” – HOT Director of Production Rob Reynolds

BECAUSE PRODUCING AN OPERA TRULY TAKES A VILLAGE, #HOTVILLAGE GIVES YOU AN INTIMATE LOOK AT ONE PIECE OF PRODUCTION FOR EACH HOT OPERA. IN THIS PIECE, HOT’S PROPS TEAM TOOK US BEHIND THE SCENES TO LEARN MORE ABOUT WHAT GOES INTO THE OBJECTS ONSTAGE THAT HELP TELL THE STORY OF THE DAUGHTER OF THE REGIMENT.

 

A Lot More Than Just “Fake Things”

During a backstage tour this month for students taking part in HOT’s residency programs, Prop Master Rick Romer posed a question to a group of 2^nd and 3^rd grade students: “What is a prop?”

The students considered the question for a few moments before one enthusiastically replied “a fake thing!”

Rick laughed, and then explained to the students that a prop is “anything that an actor or singer touches, holds, or uses as part of the scene.” And as each student thought about the definition, he exposed them to a series of “fake things” within HOT’s February production of Donizetti’s Daughter of the Regiment that have some very real stories to tell.

As an opera with a plot that features the French military, the audience won’t be surprised to see French flags waving and the chorus of soldiers carrying fake weapons. But behind the scenes, other props involve a process that is greater than what meets the eye.

To demonstrate this to the students, Rick took out a silver platter topped with crystal glasses that were filled with champagne. He asked one young girl to carry it across the stage without spilling. As he saw her grow worried before attempting, he said, “Do you see what the problem is?”

He then explained how the prop team replaced the crystal with plastic glasses and glued metal washers to the bottom of each one to weigh them down. Finally, he demonstrated how a colored gel was placed into each cup to give the appearance of liquid from afar without the risk of spilling.

“I wanted the students to understand the process of problem solving, so they feel like they’re the ones discovering the solution or that they’re sharing in that process,” Rick said.

The Prop Master Rick has come a long way in his 50 year career in theatre and television since he created his first prop at 12 years old. His sister was cast as a maid in a school production, and she needed to carry a bag of groceries onto the stage for each production. Using just Lincoln Logs, Rick created a loaf of bread, celery, and other food items for the prop.

“I was in the house seeing my bag of groceries that I made, and it was like something clicked,” Rick said. “I really think that was my ‘aha’ moment.”

From Marcello’s easel in La Bohème to Rigoletto’s jester stick, props may not steal the show, but behind them lies a unique process of troubleshooting and ingenuity. For Rick and his team of two assistants, problem solving is an integral part of the process of prop creation. And they enjoy the challenge.

“I love running props, because I like being in the process of the production,” said Prop Assistant Emi Yabuta as she painted a plastic pineapple to give it more depth. “Things happen and you have to solve problems on the spot. It’s wonderful. I love doing that.”

Emi begins each production by reading the opera’s libretto to learn more about its plot and characters. She believes that props should go a step further than simply being utilized by a character – they should help show the audience each character’s temperament.

In Act I of The Daughter of the Regiment, Tonio is hauled onto the scene by the French regiment in a burlap sack. After Marie explains that he saved her life, the soldiers allow him to have a drink with them, but he receives a smaller tin mug than the rest of them. Both the burlap sack and the smaller mug serve the purpose of showing that the Regiment is not yet on Tonio’s side.

But Emi’s favorite props are those of the chorus, because without them, the characters have no individuality.

“The chorus members have no names, so they have things to define them, like baskets or farm tools” she said. “It does change the coloring of the stage, because then it’s more than just a bunch of costumed people singing.”

The team’s favorite prop of the show, though, is one that Rick designed and created. Called the “crash box,” it is never seen and only heard. As the Duchess of Crackenthorpe leaves the home of The Marquise in Act II, she does so with a clamoring racket. The comical noise is created by a large wooden box filled with various metal entities rolling down steps backstage.

At the end of production, the crash box or the Lincoln Log bag of groceries probably won’t be what the audience remembers. And Rick doesn’t want them to.

“They shouldn’t take attention away from the music,” he said. “They’re simply there. They do their job, and they tell their story.”

• Purchase Tickets to HOT’s Daughter of the Regiment

It takes a bunch of talented, skilled people that you never see or hear to pull these things off. There’s a lot going on that the audience doesn’t see. That’s what we are. We’re the people you don’t see. And we don’t want to be seen. We want to have these transitions happen and appear like magic, to some extent. Being the support role is what we do.” – HOT Director of Production Rob Reynolds

Because producing an opera truly takes a village, #HOTVillage gives you an intimate look at one piece of production for each HOT opera. In this piece, HOT’s principle lighting and set designer Peter Dean Beck took us behind the scenes of As One for a look at the new production’s lighting.

Lighting in “A World Where People Sing”

Peter Dean Beck has designed scenery and lighting for more than 350 productions around North America and Asia. Almost a third of those were HOT productions.

“I’ve been with [the Hawaii Opera Theatre] a long, long time,” Peter said. “I started here in 1986, and this is my 32nd season with the company. I’ve always done this. It’s the only career I’ve ever had.”

Peter didn’t always know that opera production would be his career, though. But he did have an awareness of the behind-the-scenes aspects of theater productions since his youth. Peter’s grandfather was a screenwriter, so he grew up with firsthand experiences of the world behind the curtain.

But it wasn’t until he attended Oberlin College that Peter had the opportunity to be a part of an opera production. He then went to graduate school at the New York University Tisch School of the Arts. His first work in opera was Verdi’s La Traviata in North Carolina in 1977. 

“That was an education, let me tell you,” Peter said. “I began to understand that opera can be dramatic and theatrical. It’s more than just singing.”

Designing lighting and sets for an opera was very different from lighting a play, a dance piece, or even a musical, he learned. Unlike in a movie, where a camera is able to tell an audience where to look, lighting must do this in opera. And in opera, sets have to be able to accommodate the strict tempo of the music. For instance, if a chorus has four bars to enter the stage, they need to be able to maneuver within a set in that amount of time. Lastly, in opera, the designer of lighting and sets must also consider each singer’s ability to be heard within their placement on the stage. 

“I’ve always maintained that a world where people sing shouldn’t look like a world where people speak,” Peter said. “Singing rather than speaking moves us into a more lyrical and abstracted dimension.”

Over the course of his lifetime in work with scenic and lighting designing, Peter has worked on many repeat operas. He has designed for ten productions of both Madame Butterfly and The Magic Flute. His most recent work with HOT was designing the lighting and scenery for this season’s production of Bizet’s Carmen. He will also be back for HOT’s next season production, Donizetti’s Daughter of the Regiment.

• Purchase Tickets to Daughter of the Regiment

But there are still operas he’s never worked on before. One of those pieces is HOT’s new production, As One.

As One is a chamber opera for a cast of two singers and a string quartet. There are no costume changes and minimal set pieces and props. Additionally, HOT is performing the piece in an all-new venue, Pier 10 at the Aloha Tower Terminal. All of these factors make for a unique lighting design challenge.

“It’s always interesting to discover a new piece,” Peter said.

Peter’s work in designing sets and lighting always begins with an in-depth knowledge of the production itself. He learns the music’s timing and the libretto’s story so that he can accommodate these with his vision. The next step is designing for the performance space. 

“Working in the Blaisdell Concert Hall is a lot different from working in Pier 10,” Peter said. “Pier 10 presented major challenges. It’s not a theatre, so we had to make it one. There’s a lot of hidden effort when you play in a place like that.”

Peter’s crew erected three lighting “trusses,” or metal overhead supports for lighting, over the stage in Pier 10. They then hung 44 individual lights from the trusses and focused them in the direction they would need to point. 

After that, Peter sat down with As One’s Director and Stage Manager to set “lighting cues,” — timed recordings of how the lights will look during each part of the opera. In As One, there are about 80 of these cues. Before the production begins, an electrician does one last check that all lights are working, and then it’s show time.

Some of Peter’s favorite lighting moments in the production come in the third part of the piece. In stark contrast with the opera’s earlier settings, like classrooms and cafes, the third part is set in nature, in Norway. The story’s protagonist, Hannah, describes her experiences of rowing a boat and searching the night sky for the Northern Lights.

“It goes to a very deep color there that we haven’t seen before,” Peter said. “It has this mystical, cosmic quality instead of the harsh white light of being indoors.”

Many people think of lighting as a nuts-and-bolt, technical job, Peter expressed. But to him, designing lighting is much more than that. It’s poetry.

“A performer uses him or herself as their medium as an artist. I use stuff,” he said.

“I try to make poetry out of stuff.”

It takes a bunch of talented, skilled people that you never see or hear to pull these things off. There’s a lot going on that the audience doesn’t see. That’s what we are. We’re the people you don’t see. And we don’t want to be seen. We want to have these transitions happen and appear like magic, to some extent. Being the support role is what we do.” – HOT Director of Production Rob Reynolds

Because producing an opera truly takes a village, #HOTVillage gives you an intimate look at one piece of production for each HOT opera! In this piece, we take you behind the scenes with HOT’s costume department. Enjoy this video and Q&A with HOT’s Costume Director Helen E. Rodgers.

 

Tell me a little bit about the costumes for this production of Carmen.

When I was looking for a set of costumes to rent, I learned that Opera Omaha who had an older set. They said they were planning to fold it into stock , but they would be willing to sell it to us. So I arranged for that to happen. The package that Omaha owned was originally designed for New York Opera, by Eduardo Secano. It’s the first set of costumes we own here at HOT. They shipped it on the first of August. It came in about 30 boxes.

When it arrived, my crew and I unpacked everything and sorted it all into types – meaning shirts with shirts, and pants with pants – measured everything for size, and then started assigning it to the people who we have in the show. When I left, I knew what people we did not have costumes for and what the package didn’t include, which was some lead things – some chorus things. They did have all the soldiers we needed, all the processional costumes at the end, which are really quite spectacular, a chunk of leads, a chunk of chorus, and the entire children’s chorus. Then I left with, essentially, a list of what costumes I still needed. I went to the costume shop Malabar and pulled the remaining costumes we needed for the look of the piece. When all those were shipped here, we started up with fittings.

How long did the unpacking take?

The Omaha stuff took two days to unpack with a crew of four. That included some measuring and hanging, because nothing was shipped on hangers. And then it took another few days to measure and label everything before we started sewing it. The Malabar items from Canada probably took a day, because it was already assigned.

How many costumes are there in Carmen?

Let’s see if I can get these numbers right – we now have 20 men in the chorus, 21 women, 18 children including one child super, and 10 leads – many of whom have 3 different looks. So if you do that math, it’s a lot of clothes!

But some of the chorus looks repeat, like the chorus in Act I is cigarette girls. The cigarette girls are basically in an underwear look. Traditionally, the premise in Carmen is that they’re factory workers. It’s hot in the factory, so during the course of the day, they’re working with other women, and they strip down to be more comfortable. Which is why, in Act I, we find the men waiting to come find them on break. Not only are they known to be open for romance, they also might be scantily clad. So all of those underwear outfits they then wear later as a petticoat under their other looks.

There’s also a super quick change between Act III and Act IIII. There’s a musical interlude just short of two and a half minutes. In that time, just about everyone in the show goes from being a smuggler in the mountains – all layered up – to getting ready for the bullfight scene. And while it’s not too hard to change people in two and a half minutes, it is hard to change 48 people in two and a half minutes. So a lot of them are layered up in such a way that they can simply remove pieces.

Do you have any favorite costumes?

A lot of times, companies will skip the procession at the end of the opera. But if you skip the procession, you don’t have as much of the flashiness, or the visual, but you still have the emotion of the piece. We are doing the procession onstage, and the costumes we got for the matadors and picadors are beautiful! They are satin, they were embroidered, and they were sequined over and beaded. Escamillo’s is from that set. Carmen’s black dress is from that set. They’re just lovely.

If you had to guess retail value for those pieces, what would you guess?

If you had it built in a shop today, in a New York shop, I would say each costume in that set would probably be $5,000, which is why this was such a wonderful find.

The value surprises a lot of people. But if you think about it, if a man is wearing a suit or a woman a full outfit, and you just add up everything they’re wearing from head to toe, then it usually makes a bit more sense to people how much costumes cost. All of these items are custom tailored, so that’s factored into the value, as well.

Why do you enjoy working with costumes?

I have been doing this for a little over 35 years professionally. I studied costumes – I went to the College of William & Mary. I was interested in fashion, and I was interested in theatre. I ended up taking costume design courses and thought, ‘this is even better!’

The wonderful thing about opera is that so many pieces are set in a historical period. It’s fun to take a walk into that period and figure out what people wear. It’s of course the most fun for me as a designer when I get to design and build things, but few opera companies can afford that kind of work anymore. Assembling things so that they look like they all were meant to be together is also artistry. I’ve done shows where we have six or so sources or costumes, and the idea is that it’s all a cohesive look up there. That kind of thing requires some attention. Because I have a musical background, I appreciate the music in opera. It’s come to be the theatrical performance that I prefer. Opera is like being home. 

Why do you think audiences here should see this production?

It’s a wonderful cast. It’s a great opera for people who know the opera, because they know the music. But it’s also a great first opera, because so much of the music is familiar. It’s being used right now in a couple commercials you’ll hear. It’s a great one to bring people to introduce them to opera. It’s got all the big moments – it’s got love, it’s got passion, someone dies at the end – oh, was that a spoiler?

• Get Tickets to Bizet’s Carmen!