Yesterday was the very first day of performances for Sleeping Beauty with Houston Grand Opera’s Opera to Go! program. The OTG company has been in rehearsals for Sleeping Beauty for a couple weeks and have been working very hard, but the show has presented its set of challenges for music and staging, so we have had our work cut out for us. Also, due to some previous engagements of some of the singers (including myself), there were a few rehearsals during which we had to make due without one of the cast members. But “the show must go on,” and as March 7 approached, we began to feel the urgency of getting the opera on its feet.

Here’s a breakdown of the day that “woke up” Sleeping Beauty!

5:30am The alarm clock begins to buzz in my ear. I wake up and begin by humming and mumbling through my lines while taking a shower.

6:30am I walk out the door and start driving. It just so happens to be the COLDEST day I can remember having in a long time in Houston!

6:55am I pick up soprano Hannah Nelson (the “Sleeping Beauty” herself!) from her home. We do lots of driving for OTG, so we always try to carpool to have some companionship on the road and care for the environment. It’s also a good to have a buddy system to make sure that everybody is out of bed (!) and heading towards the venue together.

7:00am In the car, Hannah and I talk through a few staging and musical changes made in the last couple of rehearsals. I was out of town for performances in Pittsburgh this week, so I missed our final run-throughs of the show. Hannah also tells me that she woke up this morning feeling under the weather and is concerned about being able to sing in today’s performances.

7 :30am Hannah and I arrive at Colony Meadows Elementary School (in Sugar Land), where the rest of the cast have already arrived are checking in with the receptionist. Braving the cold outside, we load the set and costumes into the school’s “cafetorium.”

7:50am We finish setting up our stage wares and get in costume. Behind the closed curtain, lips trills and scales are heard as each singer begins to wake up the vocal apparatus to sing properly. Then we walk through a couple parts of the show that have been a bit unclear and some changes I had missed. Dennis shows me a new final final cadence of the show, newly composed music that I haven’t yet seen, yet I am about to perform in a few minutes!

8:15am With the cast backstage, Chuck walks out and greets the children. With a few deep breaths and perhaps even a silent prayer (!), we walk on stage and begin our performance. The performance goes pretty well, all things considered. There are a couple moments when it seemed like we weren’t quite sure where to stand or move, and a couple small vocal lines missed or forgotten. However, we have all been performing for a long time now, so we manage to cover for these sorts of things very well. Also, our pianist, YoungHa Guk, is a very careful listener, and when things go a little awry, she follows us and covers for us beautifully.

8:55 am We finish the performance, and the cast stands in a line on stage to introduce ourselves. We then give the opportunity for questions from the children. They ask questions like, “Is that a real crown you are wearing?” And Dennis replies, “No, this is made of plastic. We don’t want to use really nice things on stage because it might get damaged or broken, so we use pretend items. Those are called props. Props are items used on stage to help tell the story.”

9:05am Q&A time is over, and we take a little break to get water, etc. We also talk through a few things that went wrong in the show and browse through our music. This opera also incorporates the use of several puppets. Two of the characters I play (the Raven and the Italian Prince) are portrayed on stage through the combination of my singing voice and a puppet that I control while singing. The puppets are quite different: one is a bird attached to a short pole, the other is a 6-foot-tall man made out of plywood, PVC pipe, fabric, and foam (pictured on the far left with Hannah in the picture to the left). He also has one arm that I can control for expressive purposes. It is really quite fun to get to play with puppets!

9:15am Performance number 2 begins. The children in this audience are a little older, so they get more of the jokes and seem more attentive to the show. We also perform much better, cleaning up a few parts of the show we missed last time.

9:55am Q&A time again. This time, a boy asks, “How do you sing with THAT VOICE?” We laugh and answer, “Opera singers spend a long time training to use their voice in a healthy manner. We also learn to sing strongly so we don’t need to use microphones.” Another girl asks, “Why do the boys sing so high?” to which we respond with a similar answer about training and also about the variety of types of voices people have.

10:05am We get out of costume and strike the set. We load the whole thing back into the OTG van and finally get back on the road.

11:15am The cast meets for lunch at La Madeleine and spends some casual time chatting and also clarifying some parts of the show that still need some work. We get a much needed break for a while before our next call.

1:15pm The cast arrives at St. Vincent DePaul Catholic School in West University. We are performing for the entire student body, grades K-8. After the set is up and costumes on, HGO staff member Chris Novosad drops by to take pictures of the cast for PR purposes.

2:00pm Our third performance of the day begins. The stage we use is pretty big, but not quite big enough for the staging we employ. A few moments we find ourselves eerily close to falling off a 3 foot ledge as we wiggle and spin past one another on stage. Also, the set up has children almost surrounding us on 3 sides, so when we go behind the set, we are in clear view of about 200 children. This sort of thing is common for Opera to Go, we just chalk it up to a learning experience for the kids. They get to see how things work on stage AND backstage.

2:40pm We finish the performance and get some questions this time about our costumes and props.

3:10pm We finish loading out the final parts of our set and costumes. A successful first day for Sleeping Beauty!

To see a full Flickr photo set from Opera to Go! activities (new photos frequently added), click here.