L'Elisir d'Amore: an Opera Adventure

Somehow, it's already November. Somehow, we have rehearsed, teched, opened, and closed L'Elisir d'Amore. Somehow, I'm sitting here on the other side of stage managing my first opera.

L'Elisir d'Amore for Lyric Theatre @ Illinois was everything I could have hoped for my first opera stage management experience: beautiful, funny, challenging, and including some of the loveliest people I've ever had the privilege of working with.

There are stories that I will write about later, but for now, have a quick list of good things.


Challenges/Successes: 

• Score Calling - Calling completely from a score for the first time was amazing. My musical mind was in heaven.
  
• Italian Pronunciation - I may not know what I'm saying, but a colleague was kind enough to work through the finer points of Italian with me so I could give placement to the performers in tech after a hold without confusion.
  
• Performer Flying - Dr. Dulcamara flew in his balloon every night, safely, without incident. I consider this the greatest success.
• Increased Scale - Simply looking at the number of people involved, L'elisir is easily the largest show I've worked on. Our total came in around 150 people, which could have been intimidating. Instead, I regularly found myself saying, 'Everything about this show is so big! I love it!' I may be biased, but it definitely helped that those 150 people were phenomenal. 
• Opera Appreciation - I wasn't sure what to expect walking into the rehearsal room the first day of staging for an art form I knew little about. I definitely did not expect to fall in love with it. The fact I'm seeing my first professional opera tonight, have been researching and learning as much as I can about opera these past few weeks, and have plans to see a show at the Met in March speaks volumes. As does the fact I continue to happily hum L'elisir rather constantly. I think it's safe to say I'm in love. 

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