Tag Archives: Andre Previn

Jill Gardner on Blanche Dubois: “You have to really sing it!”

Tennessee Williams’ character Blanche Dubois from his famous play A Streetcar Named Desire is one of the hardest female roles to act on the stage.

A National Public Radio article describes it as being “like climbing Mount Everest, both physically and emotionally demanding. Actresses talk of losing their voice, suffering bouts of depression or having anxiety attacks while playing the part. Yet they covet the role.”

Opera singer Jill Gardner can relate.

“To play the role of Blanche and to go through what she goes through is emotionally very taxing,” Gardner said. “And, operatically, you have to be able to sing it! It’s not just about portraying it. You have to really sing it.”

She’ll be singing the role of Blanche in André Previn’s opera adaptation of the Tennessee Williams play, which Hawaii Opera Theatre will open this weekend. Blanche Dubois, the story’s main character, is a Southern belle who travels to New Orleans to be with her sister after losing her ancestral home and job. A conflict between Blanche and her sister’s husband unfolds with tragic consequences.

The role of Blanche is new for Gardner, and this weekend’s production will be her debut performance.

“I knew it was going to be a challenge unlike many of the other roles that I’d done,” she said. “Blanche is complicated, because she’s just so fragile and so vulnerable, and in the end she really suffers such a horrific fate that is unlike other characters that I’ve played thus far in my career.”

The last time Gardner performed with HOT was in 2013 to sing Puccini’s Tosca – a role that she has sung 15 times now.

In contrast, singing Blanche for the first time makes Gardner feel a sense of vulnerability, she said.

That vulnerability was an essential part of Blanche, though, Gardner found.

She studied different actresses to discover what they brought to the role. Vivien Leigh exemplified vulnerability, Gardner thought, and Jessica Tandy perfectly embodied the culture of a Southern woman. Her favorite performance was from Ann-Margret, who she felt embodied Blanche’s sensual energy.

A couple topics she didn’t need to educate herself on were Blanche’s Southern upbringing or family values.  Gardner grew up in North Carolina, and she was also the oldest of her siblings.

“I was so happy to embrace my own culture within it,” she said. “I’ve never felt like I was far away from the heart of the character in that way.”

Gardner was thrilled to take on the role when HOT offered it. But like many of the actresses and singers before her, she found it took a toll on her.

After five days of intense rehearsing, Gardner said she felt overwhelmed.

“After that first week I just felt that I was lost,” she said. “It’s hard, too, because you have to walk her walk with her. I want to constantly take care of her because she’s so fragile. Going through Blanche’s journey during this opera was… rough!”

But Gardner has drawn inspiration from the Italian opera heroines in her repertoire to find the motivation needed to conquer Blanche’s role, and to do so with positivity.

Gardner searched for Blanche’s redeeming qualities, and found that she admired the complex character’s appreciation of joy, light, and the beauty all around her. Previn’s music, she said, highlights these attributes.

“If I keep that in mind, along with the intention that I will always fight to the end, that’s what balances everything,” she said. “That positive intention helps me to feel like I’m not being undone by [the role].”

Gardner feels empathy for Blanche, she said, and she hopes that audiences leave the concert hall with a desire to show empathy to others in their lives.

And despite the challenging nature of the role, she hopes to sing it again.

“I really do hope to return to this role,” Gardner said. “I love it in its complexity, I think that the music is so beautiful, and I do think it fits me very well.”

By Allison Kronberg

The Lives of Tennessee Williams and André Previn

HOT will open the doors to André Previn’s musical transformation of the classic Tennessee Williams’ play A Streetcar Named Desire on January 27.

The production — and the phenomenal success it represents — is a tribute to how music can complement theatre, and vice versa.

 Williams wrote with authority about the challenges faced by the characters in his play, such as depression and substance abuse. His work is distinctively his own.  But André Previn’s rich life experiences and love of jazz predisposed him to be up to the task of reinterpreting the dark and emotional motifs of the American classic for an operatic audience.

They are two very different artists — the playwright and the composer. Yet, when one compares the two men’s lives, there are interesting commonalities. And the result is a fascinating, posthumous collaboration in the form of A Streetcar Named Desire.

Early Life
 Both Williams and Previn had happy childhoods, through Williams was born 18 years earlier. Williams grew up the son of a shoe company executive and a southern belle in Columbus, Mississippi. Previn was born in Berlin, Germany to a wealthy family. But both artists lives were soon upheaved. When Williams family moved to the city of St. Louis, Missouri, he became unsatisfied with life. He took to writing to provide an escape from city life and his parents’ dysfunctional marriage. The threat of World War II and Nazi rule, on the other hand, is what forced Previn out of his peaceful youth. He and his family fled to Paris in 1938, and Previn devoted his time in the city to studying at the Paris Conservatory of Music.

 As both creators were beginning to recognize their talents, they faced obstacles. In 1929 Williams began studying journalism at the University of Missouri. But his father ended his education after learning that Williams’ male love interest attended the same school. Williams became a shoe salesman at his father’s company soon after, and his hatred of the labor contributed to his chronic depression. Previn’s studies in Paris were cut short when his family announced their move to the United States. No one in the family spoke English. Previn gave music lessons at home to earn money, but he wasn’t content with the role.

 Finding a spark of passion would bring both of the men closer to their dreams.

Flourishing Careers
 Williams moved to New Orleans at the age of 28 and fell deeply in love with the city, which would prove to inspire much of his later work, including A Streetcar Named Desire. He began submitting his plays to local contests, and word of his talent spread. He landed an agent not long after. Previn, who had again taken up studying composition, became infatuated with American jazz. His unique understanding of both classical music and jazz drew admirers. He wrote a musical score for Metro-Goldwyn Mayer (MGM) and signed a contract with the movie studio at just 18 years old.

 And so the artists’ careers began. Williams spent years writing and traveling the country before his first critically acclaimed play, The Glass Menagerie, hit the stage in 1944. The play won Williams a New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award and brought him fame. A Streetcar Named Desire opened two years later, earning him another a Drama Critics’ Award and his first Pulitzer Prize. Around the same time, Previn was receiving accolades as well. As MGM Musical Director, he adapted hit songs for films and composed original scores for musicals and other dramas. He was nominated for sixteen Academy Awards and won four. In the late 60s and early 70s, Previn was pulled again by classical music and began recording with the London Symphony Orchestra and also became conductor-in-chief of the Houston Symphony Orchestra.

 But some of the same issues that plagued the characters of A Streetcar Named Desire, such as depression, addiction, and adultery, would eventually present themselves in the two men’s public lives.

Challenges
 Williams had fought depression his whole life, and writing was his salvation. But even writing couldn’t ease the pain of losing his best friend to cancer in the 60s. The decade also brought the harshest criticism of his work by the press. Though he continued to write, he became more and more dependent on alcohol and drugs to cope. In 1969, Williams’ brother hospitalized him. That same year, Previn was dealing with problems of his own. While Previn was married to his second wife, he had an affair with actress Mia Farrow, the ex-wife of popular singer Frank Sinatra. She gave birth to their twin sons in early 1970. Previn left the Houston Symphony Orchestra and he and his wife divorced due to the misconduct. Previn married Farrow afterward, but they also divorced after about a decade.

 Both men never faltered in their craft, even with the setbacks.

Lasting Achievements
 After Williams was released from hospitalization, he began feverishly writing again. Over the next decade or so, he wrote plays, a memoir, poems, short stories and a novel. But In 1983, Williams’ addiction caught back up with him, and he died in a New York City hotel room surrounded by bottles of wine and pills. Despite the abrupt and heartbreaking end to his career, Williams went down in history as one of America’s greatest playwrights, winning four Drama Critic Circle Awards, two Pulitzer Prizes and the Presidential Medal of Freedom. He died, perhaps, not recognizing his full impact on the stage and the screen. Previn, on the other hand, has lived to see his full life’s work honored and his earlier missteps reconciled. He toured throughout Europe and the United States as the principal conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra and continued to compose throughout the 70s and 80s. In 1982, Previn married and had one child. Additionally, he formed the Andre Previn Jazz Trio, which toured in the early 90s. In 1998 Previn received a Lifetime Achievement Award for his career as a conductor and composer at the Kennedy Center Honors ceremony in Washington, D.C. Now 87, Previn is known as one of the most versatile musicians in the world.

The opera adaptation of the classic American play A Streetcar Named Desire is the result of the combination of Williams’ and Previns’ rich life experiences, unique perspectives, and monumental talent.


To see the work of these historic artists come to life in Hawaii, click the button below.

By Allison Kronberg

Sources:

Tennessee Williams Biography


http://www.biography.com/people/tennessee-williams-9532952#synopsis
http://www.notablebiographies.com/Pe-Pu/Previn-Andr.html