Here’s another installment of my recent interview with the cast and creative team of Beggar’s Opera.
Bob: Can you talk about the timeline of this project? Stephen, how did you first get involved?
Stephen: [Opera Theater Oregon's Artistic Director] Katie Taylor asked me to do this in September, 2008, and I said yes by November. I started conversating and brought Michael on in January. We started writing shortly after, in March. We wrote the new songs first for Michael’s band [Buoy LaRue] without any script done. [Our first read through of Act One] was in August. [The cast] didn’t get Act Two until….
Bobby: We didn’t get Act Two until after the rehearsal process started. Did I say that out loud? [Laughs]
Stephen: Everyone here is real fast….One thing Michael and I were specifically looking for was singing actors, and singing actors who have a huge palette to their own abilities as singers and that can pick up a lot of different styles and that most importantly really deliver the text….We don’t have the luxury of anyone walking into this house having heard any of this before, so the stakes are very high for communication. And I really take that very seriously, because there are a lot of times when you hear opera in English and it’s just really shitty diction, not understanding what’s going on, and every word has to count and every word has to be understood. And believe it or not, I’ve actually put a lot of thought into the lyrics. I feel really strongly that that’s one of the things, we have the audience really understanding. I think it’s all too rare in opera in English where the audience can get every word.
Bob: Which given the contemporary references in this version, is extremely important.
Stephen: Yes!
Michael: Stephen and I got together several months ago, early in the year, and we had a chance to read through the script, and at that point we chose our favorite airs, or the original tunes that we both agreed on wanting to keep. At that point it somewhat determined what character was singing it, so I had an idea back then about how I could arrange certain instruments to go with certain characters, but I didn’t really know what those voices would sound like until after the audition process, at which point I started writing. And what I knew was that I was to write some original songs in the vein of my band Buoy LaRue—those weren’t actually Buoy LaRue songs, these are new tunes in the vein of the band—and then arrange all of the original airs.
Stephen: It was a weird process that we went through. So Michael and I would sit down with a tune, and we were like, “OK, let’s listen to the tune,” and this might even be before I had written a lyric for the tune, sometimes after. One would be “Virgins are like the fair flower in its lustre,” which Polly sings in the original, but in this version Gigi, as her character as a homeless person, sings it as a solo. And I had a specific idea of the general sound world that we wanted from that tune. And at that time it was given to Mrs. Peachum…
Beth: And Gigi stole it!
Stephen: But I wasn’t too much more specific [with Michael] than here’s the idea behind it, here’s the character who’s likely to sing it. Go for it.
Michael: And I remember that at that point, I had only worked on a couple of tunes in Act One, which were more bubbly and kind of light and more upbeat, and then out came this tune, which ended up being really moody and slow and kind of gritty. And we really liked it, but it didn’t work in Act One because of the way it’s set with the other songs, so we put it in Act Two, and therefore changed the character.
Stephen: I would sing the tune, I would play the tune, we would talk about where I was at with the lyric if I had a lyric for the tune at that point—not always, sometime, even though sometimes it was not the final lyric–and then he would write something and come back and by the time it came back I would have something close to a final lyric, and what he was doing with the music would help me inform also what was going on. So it was a highly collaborative process.
Michael: [It has been] a very collaborative process…[Stephen and I have] worked very, very well together, even from the very beginning, when we were meeting at the Ace Hotel, just having coffee and talking about the show. From day one it was really smooth and collaborative.
Stephen: [Michael] has picked up some new lingo, like recitative. [Laughs]
Michael: Recitative…
Stephen: When we were looking at something, looking at a tune, I was like “Michael, it’s just like a recit.”
Michael: And I was like…”Yeah.” Recit?
