[In the article below, Daniel Wakin, classical music
reporter for the New York Times, describes some of the issues opera
companies and singers cope with when there are scenes on stage that feature
food and eating or drinking. I’ve never
been much of an opera fan, but we in theater do encounter some of the same
problems, even when singing doesn’t enter into the mix. Handling and eating or drinking food or
beverages can offer unique challenges for both the performers and the stage
crews, as you’ll read.
[Wakin’s article appeared in the “Dining” section of
the Times on Wednesday, 9 May 2012. The
on-line edition of the article was revised to correct earlier
versions which incorrectly identified the composer of the opera Tosca as Giacomo Puccini; it is Giuseppe Verdi.]
Hansel and Gretel stuff pastries into their mouths, topping
them off with toasted gingerbread witch. Leporello pours out a fine Marzemino
wine from northern Italy for Don Giovanni, then nibbles at a piece of pheasant.
Schaunard calls for Rhine wine, roast venison and dressed lobster for his
fellow Puccinian Bohemians at the Café Momus in Paris.
And that’s just a sample of this season’s menu at the
Metropolitan Opera.
Opera, of all the art forms, is singularly associated with
food, whether because of the appetites of well-girthed singers or the sensual
pleasures celebrated in its rich ragout of music, emotion and stagecraft.
Just a few nights at any opera house will drive this home.
Hardly a performance goes by without some reference to a meal, enough so that cookbooks
and even scholarly articles have been devoted to the subject. Opera luminaries
have dishes named after them, like peach Melba and Melba toast, inspired by the
Australian soprano Nellie Melba. The Met even has a backstage kitchen for
meeting the culinary demands of librettos, and singers regularly face the
challenge of timing bites between musical phrases.
“Every single opera, at least if it doesn’t refer to food,
it refers to some sort of passion, and that’s one of the things people relate
to,” the soprano Carol Vaness said. “For even Wagner, it’s got that ‘food of
the gods’ feeling to it.”
David Anchel, a former opera singer, thinks there may be an
element of oral fixation to the phenomenon: food goes in the mouth, and song
comes out of it. But opera’s foodiness, he believes, comes mainly from
something more basic. “Opera is about life,” he said. “How could you describe
people’s lives without having them eat? It’s a very passionate thing, often.”
Mr. Anchel is well qualified to explain the connection. A
frequent opera-going companion of mine and one of the best nonprofessional
cooks I know, he sang with many small companies, briefly ran a catering
business and found a ready supply of cookbooks in the bookstores where he used
to work. Years ago he even proposed (unsuccessfully) a PBS series based on
opera meals, in which he would sing scenes and cook dishes that might have been
served in them. “I could be the operatic chef,” he said.
That fascination with the crossroads of food and music began
30 years ago when he and his wife, Julia Heyer, were young singers and would
invite colleagues for parties that started with opera readings. “After we sang
through the opera I would cook a meal” in its style, Mr. Anchel said. “I really
thought this was a way to understand better what the characters were all about,
if I knew exactly what they were eating.”
Food is so central to the operas of Giuseppe Verdi that the
University of Notre Dame musicologist Pierpaolo Polzonetti has written papers
on the subject. He has come up with what he calls the laws of
“gastromusicology” to explain what food can signify in opera.
“The first law is that no meal can be sad,” Mr. Polzonetti
said. “No matter what, when people eat, people seem to be happy, even if
something bad is going to happen.” Other laws hold that meals show social
cohesion, and that the presence of food or drink “excludes immediate
catastrophe” (except, as in operas like “Simon Boccanegra,” when poison is involved).
The title character of Verdi’s “Falstaff” is one of the
great operatic eaters. His bill at the Garter Inn, as he recounts at the
opera’s opening, is for 6 chickens, 3 turkeys, 2 pheasants, 1 anchovy and 30
bottles of sherry. In “Macbeth,” Verdi prescribes a “sumptuously prepared
feast” for the banquet scene in which Banquo’s ghost appears.
Another Italian, Puccini, larded his operas with meals—particularly
“La Bohème,” a story of starving artists in 19th-century Paris.
In their chilly garret on Christmas Eve, Rodolfo, Schaunard,
Colline and Marcello dine on a cold roast, Bordeaux and pastry. Later, outside
the Café Momus in the Latin Quarter, vendors hawk an effusion of Parisian
street food: oranges, dates, hot chestnuts, nougat, whipped cream, candies,
fruit tarts, coconut milk, carrots, trout and plums from Tours. At a table, the
bohemians order sausage, roast venison, turkey, Rhine wine and lobster. They
also eat “a poem” of a chicken, as Colline sings, and stew—a sumptuous evening
in contrast to their friend Mimi’s consumptive and tragic death.
Opera companies have to deal with these meals and often
provide real food. The Met’s has a fully functional kitchen inside its room for
small props, equipped with a Kenmore refrigerator, Corian countertops and a pot
of rosemary that Mime uses for his potion in the current production of Wagner’s
“Siegfried.” (Hanging in the prop room are two unappetizing fake severed heads
belonging to John the Baptist in Strauss’s “Salome.”)
Grocery shopping is done at the Fairway Market several
blocks away on Broadway. Michael Albergo, a prop man, prepares much of the
food, taking heed of gluten or dairy intolerance among the chorus and singers.
He cooks chickens in a convection microwave, and cuts them up ahead of time to
make it easier for a singer to rip off a drumstick.
“If there is going to be the ubiquitous opera chicken, I
would prefer it to have been cooked in the last 45 minutes rather than the last
45 days,” said Thomas Hampson, the baritone. As Don Giovanni, “I remember once
getting a piece of chicken that really was roadkill,” he said. “I finally found
a handkerchief and relieved myself of it.”
Sometimes prop managers prefer precooked food. For “Bohème”
the Met used to order chicken from its cafeteria, but discovered that KFC was
much cheaper.
Yes, much of this food gets eaten. While the practices of
singers differ widely, a surprising number chow down on the props. Some do so
for dramatic reasons. “When you’re faking your way through it,” said Kate Lindsey,
a mezzo-soprano, “people can see through that action.”
Others are simply hungry. Singers generally eat lightly
before a performance, and stage food is a handy snack, especially three hours
into an opera.
Eating onstage has its perils. Singers have to worry about
slipping on fallen food or sullying expensive costumes, and must make sure they
have swallowed before opening their mouths to sing. “You always have to time
yourself as far as ‘What can I consume between lines?’ ” said Richard Paul Fink,
a baritone. “Can I have a full drink and a swallow? Can I consume this apple?”
It is standard for singers to make requests, especially for
wine stand-ins. Favorites are flat soda (to prevent burping while singing),
iced tea, Snapple and apple juice. The soprano Patricia Racette says she
prefers watered-down lemon-lime Gatorade because it delivers a boost of sugar
and electrolytes, and keeps her mouth moist.
The bass-baritone Luca Pisaroni, playing Leporello in the
Met’s recent “Don Giovanni,” asked for vegetable sausage, said James
Blumenfeld, the Met property master. “It was the most disgusting thing I ever
smelled,” Mr. Blumenfeld said. He added that the bass-baritone James Morris is
known for preferring bananas when he is playing Scarpia in the fatal meal scene
of Verdi’s “Tosca.” One of Mr. Albergo’s biggest jobs is Humperdinck’s “Hansel
and Gretel.” The witch in the tale has invited the unsuspecting and hungry
siblings into her house for a good fattening up before consumption. She tempts them
with apple tarts, meringues, chocolate mousse, Black Forest cake, rice pudding,
creamy Swiss rolls and mountains of profiteroles. Mr. Albergo helps lay out a
spread of real pastry, provided by Rockland Bakery of Nanuet, N.Y.
Ms. Lindsey, who played Hansel this season, said she avoided
swallowing a lot of the pastry because dairy products create phlegm and can
make it difficult to sing. “I developed a technique where I looked like I was
eating, but smeared a lot of it all over my face,” she said. While pretending
to drink milk, she learned to breathe out through her nose to avoid inhaling
it.
And it is not just leading singers who indulge onstage. At a
2010 production of Benjamin Britten’s “Albert Herring” at the Santa Fe Opera,
Ms. Lindsey, who was singing the role of Nancy, said she was amazed at how many
extras and cast members were grabbing the food, not all of it real. “You had to
watch out because there was fake ham,” she said. “You could end up eating
plastic.”
“Herring,” set in a Suffolk market town in 1900, provides a
fairly specific menu of English cuisine before its broad upgrade of recent
decades. Children sing with glee in Act 2 about the May Day feast:
Jelly!
Pink blancmange!Seedy cake! Seedy cake! (with icing on)
Treacle tart!
Sausagey rolls!
Trifle in a great big bowl!
Chicken and ham!
Cheesy straws!
Marzipan!
No such specifics are found in John Adams’s “Nixon in
China,” which features one of the best-known feasts of modern opera, the
banquet scene in which the character Chou En-lai and the American president
toast each other during Richard Nixon’s groundbreaking visit in 1972.
But the historical nature of the subject would have made the
details easy to provide. The Nixon Foundation has the official menu, which
includes “spongy bamboo shoots and egg-white consommé, shark’s fin in three
shreds, fried and stewed prawns, mushrooms and mustard green and steamed
chicken with coconut, almond junket, pastries, fruits.”
Maybe all that was too hard to sing.
[I never had to contend with
eating and singing as the performers about whom Wakin writes have, but I have
had to work with food on stage as an actor.
Sometimes it’s just a matter of cleanliness rather than performance
issues. I was doing a contemporary play
about a group of college and post-college friends living together in a large
house. In one scene, I came into the
living room with a cup and a coffee pot and I was supposed to pour myself a cup
of coffee and drink it during the scene.
Simple enough. Now, the play was
part of a three-play rep, and we’d had a couple of days off while the other
plays performed, so we had a run-through rehearsal before our performances
picked up again. During the regular
rehearsal period, my coffee pot was filled with plain water, which was fine,
and that’s what I expected this afternoon.
But when I poured the liquid from the pot into the cup, what I got was
days-old brown liquid with thick green mold growing in it! Well, of course, I wasn’t about to drink any
of that, but what was worse was that it was gross enough looking to stop me in
mid line. Thank goodness it wasn’t a
performance, of course—though I hope I’d have managed to do something in that
case to have covered the glitch. (It
probably shouldn’t have been necessary to make the note, but from then on, one
of the prop runner’s routine tasks was to check the coffee pot at preset to be
sure it was clean and filled with fresh cold coffee.)
[Speaking of covering, one
performance I was in required a collaborative effort during a meal scene to
cover a missed entrance. (I may have
told this story before once or twice.
See, for instance, “Short Takes: Theater War Stories,” 6 December 2010
on ROT.) I was
acting in a production of Jean Anouilh’s Romeo and Jeannette, a
family play in which one scene is dinner.
Part way into the scene one character has an entrance but the actress
missed her cue, leaving us all stranded on stage. The rest of the cast just improvised an entire little domestic
scene about preparing to sit down to dinner that Anouilh never wrote. I
recall it lasting several minutes, but it actually must have been much shorter.
No one in the audience, it seemed, had any idea we were making up a scene as we
went along.
[One food scene taught me a great
lesson about my own acting. I was in
graduate school and my MFA class was doing a production of The Wood Demon, Chekhov’s early version of Uncle Vanya. It
was one of the first plays I did after starting to study acting seriously,
having performed in college and in community theater as an amateur for several
years. Wood Demon starts with a long scene of a large banquet
meal served outdoors with nearly the whole cast—Wood Demon has more characters than Uncle Vanya—around a huge table. We’d carefully selected foods we could easily
eat while speaking lines, with an eye also to food that wouldn’t congeal or go
bad under the hot stage lights. But what
we couldn’t predict was where some of the place settings would end up once the
scene got underway and actors moved glasses and plates around some as the
action progressed. Now, when I was an
amateur, I could be flustered if things weren’t almost exactly the way we’d
rehearsed them. I was always afraid that
I’d upset something or attract undue attention if I had to step out of the
prescribed blocking. At almost every
performance or rehearsal of Wood Demon,
though, something I was supposed to handle was farther away than it was supposed to be,
often in front of another actor. I had
learned to be confident enough in my own work—and to trust my fellow actors
enough—simply to reach over, even stand up if necessary, and get what I needed .
. . just as if I were a guy eating at a long table among friends and
family! No one noticed this little
change in my stage work except my acting teacher, but I knew that I’d made a
small but hugely significant breakthrough in acting technique. For me, it was a little like an agoraphobe
taking a step outside his apartment.
[Finally, I was working as a teacher
and director in a middle school where the theater program was immensely
important (I had many students whose parents were pros in the business, from
soaps to the Yiddish stage). I was
directing my first full-length play at the school and we were doing Thornton Wilder’s
The Skin of
Our Teeth. (I know—who does that deeply philosophical play
with 5th-, 6th-, 7th-, and 8th-graders?
Well, I didn’t select the script; it had been chosen before I was
hired. While many of the kids didn’t
really understand the play—neither did some of the parents, I learned
later—they did a terrific job anyway.)
My Henry, the central family’s son, was an 8th-grader and in one scene
at the end of the play, he comes back home from war and digs a potato out of
the fireplace coals and eats it ravenously.
Now, I’d very explicitly instructed the stage manager and prop crew—all
students, of course—to be sure the potato every night was well-cooked, fresh,
and cold. Nonetheless, one night, the
young actor bit into a raw potato that had been placed on the set—and he chewed
it noisily and ate it. Of course, I
scolded the stage manager after the show to impress on her that this shouldn’t
happen to the actor again—but Henry liked to play the tough guy and insisted it
was perfectly cool, no problem at all!
(I insisted the student stage manager prepare the props the way she was
supposed to anyway, irrespective of the actor’s bravado. I had to teach her to do her job, didn’t I?—that
was my job, after all.)]
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