Tosca

Music by Giacomo Puccini
Libretto by Luigi Illica and Giuseppe Giacosa
Ouroboros Opera, October 2022

My first non-English opera, and what a way to enter that world. Tosca is a colossal piece of music, an enormous and demanding sing. Significant focus and tons of prep work was the cornerstone of a piece of this size.

Some background on what made this Tosca unique. We presented the piece as a semi-staged concert in the beautiful May Chapel in Rosehill Cemetery on the weekend of Halloween. The role of Mario Cavaradossi, the bombastic leading tenor, was cross-cast and sung by Jessie Lyons. To clarify, this was not a pants role - Mario became Maria in our world, leading to a not-insubstantial task of re-gendering pronouns throughout the piece. As far as we were able to research, this hadn't been done in the past, and our conductor Alexis was passionate about creating a compelling argument for exploring these classic roles with different voices. She and Jessie worked together to navigate the vocal range of the piece, and no rewrites were required, just some octave management.

Preparing the staging for a semi-staged concert is a challenge, especially for someone who prefers their staging be as complete as possible for the first rehearsal. We knew that the singers weren't planning on being 100% off-book for the entire show, but the exact patches that would be memorized weren't set in stone. This forced my hand to ostensibly block most of the show twice - one that focused on the idealized interactions I'd like to see, and fallbacks for if specific singers needed to be at a music stand. Ensuring that we could shift between these staging styles elegantly and seamlessly was paramount to making sure we didn't lose our momentum from scene to scene. In light of this, it was somewhat convenient that a majority of Tosca is a series of duets - many recits, so long as they were appropriately motivated and acted, could be at a music stand without diminishing the audience experience.

This piece offered me a tremendous opportunity to further explore my work in concert direction. It's interesting that the smallest touches and details added to a concert can give it great depth, while a fully-staged production, lacking polish in some key areas, can quickly feel cheapened. With this in mind, the world building we engaged in never lost sight of the fact that this piece was a concert - the show opened with the singer portraying Angelotti rushing, terrified, onto the stage to set the second music stand that would be used the rest of the night. The supertitles acknowledged his agitated state as another onlooker to the action along with the audience. The singers finally entered the space together, took their seats, prepared their space, and greeted each other. And as we went in and out of scenes, they'd return to their chairs. Our costumes were all selected to reflect concert attire - just with colors, lines, or accessories to indicate the characters at play. This play with the meta-narrative of the concert-going experience was all in service to one of the primary narrative mechanisms I used to differentiate this production from other concert performances of Tosca.

Any regular attendees of opera are familiar with the use of projected supertitles during a show. Even if the piece is in your native tongue, it can be a thoughtful accessibility consideration to accompany the action with well-written translations or the original libretto. Given that we were going to be using supertitles throughout the piece, I elected to also include projected stage directions that would illustrate some of the stage actions that we couldn't literally reproduce in our semi-staged setting. The experience took inspiration to the narration and dialog slides used in silent films. Rather than have this be an impartial, dry recitation of stage directions as written in the score, we gave this narrator their own voice - a slightly sardonic, friendly, and familiar guide for the audience. Making this voice a comedic character was a great way to get the audience relaxed and laughing with us during the first act of the show. It's so terribly important to get that buy-in from your audience for a piece that goes to the darker places that Tosca does in the second and third acts, and this new cast member did a great job of helping that process along.

This voice, however, had some odd qualities - it would occasionally over-narrate Tosca's actions. The exact vernacular it would use would sometimes wax more poetic than expected. And in some instances, it could be a little harsh. Through the second act, the audience is still guided by this voice until it is revealed that the narrator is Scarpia himself, the opera's primary antagonist. The audience realizes that the charismatic voice leading them through the piece was the same charismatic villain they've been instructed to vilify by the other characters. As we attempted to not play our hand too early, Scarpia behaves as any good antagonist should - on the auspices that he's the hero. Throughout act 1, Scarpia's actions were always driven towards his view of the greater good, and we navigated that line to keep him believable and charismatic in how he executed his investigation. The feeling of betrayal and bewilderment when the audience realized that the supertitles were being fed to them by Scarpia mimics the betrayal Tosca feels when she's confronted with the truth behind Scarpia's actions leading up to their confrontation in act 2.

Following Scapira's death, Tosca takes control of the supertitles - the font changes, the narrative voice also becomes more impartial and traditional. Until it doesn't - in the moments preceding Cavaradossi's death, the tone of the text is slowly undermined until Scarpia's final trump card is played. He eggs Tosca on as she goes to her death, to join him, during the finale.

This use of a staple element of the concert-going experience as a narrative tool, and playing on the preconceived notions of the audience regarding that element, gave us a ton of opportunities to explore our themes. By having Scarpia control the show's narrative (and therefor its actions), it allowed us to further examine the power of a police state and how established power structures can control your perception and the narrative of the events around you. The rejection of that idea, peaking with Scarpia's death, is eventually undermined by the tendrils of that monolithic power, continuing to assert itself on the world even after its head is cut off.

I truly enjoyed this piece, even if it was a monumental and stressful undertaking. My collaborate were spectacularly talented musicians and terribly decent human beings. The piece was singer-funded, a rejection of the pay-to-sing paradigm that can be common in operatic circles. After closing, due to adequate ticket sales, we were able to pay all the singers back what they paid in to fund the piece, and a little extra on top. In the end, this production did its best to be disruptive in a ton of ways - examining the gender roles of characters and the flexibility of classic pieces to accommodate such explorations, the meta-narrative use of the trappings of the concert experience itself to undermine expectation and further develop the show's themes, and the production ethos itself rejecting some often exploitative industry norms.