Opera boffo!

For Opera at USC director Ellen Schlaefer, classic art form is soul music.

By Larry Wood

Seated behind her desk in a soft yellow pullover and a comfortable pair of jeans and enjoying a mini Tootsie Pop, Schlaefer is definitely not your grandmother's opera director. She often tweaks the settings and characters of classic operas, giving them new looks and interpretations for both seasoned operagoers and neophytes.

For last spring's production of Otto Nicolai's The Merry Wives of Windsor, Schlaefer set the Shakespeare-inspired comic opera in suburban South Windsor, Conn., in the 1950s. The Merry Wives, Alice Ford and Meg Page, morphed into characters who resembled Lucy Ricardo and Ethel Mertz, easily outwitting their clueless husbands.

For a fund raiser some day, Schlaefer would love to show another classic from the 1950s, the Looney Tunes cartoon Rabbit of Seville, with Bugs Bunny as the limber-fingered singing barber and Elmer Fudd his luckless (and scarred) customer.

Schlaefer openly eschews the notion that opera is elitist and invites anyone who hasn't tried it or hasn't tried it lately to give it a chance. She wants her audience to have as much fun as the performers, and it's "incredibly affordable" entertainment.

"People get scared off when you say the word opera, but I would like people, if they've been thinking about it, to just give us a try. I'm a proselytizer," she said. "Opera was written for the stage. These are not concert pieces; they are theatre pieces. The operatic repertoire is vast, spanning more than 500 years. There's a little something for everyone.

"When I first got into it, people would ask me what I did, and I got tired of trying to explain it; so, I'd say, I deal in soul food because opera speaks to the soul. It's hard for me to put it into words, and I often wonder, 'Why do I like it''--and then I start hearing it."

Born and reared in Columbia, Schlaefer remembers her mother and grandmother listening to radio broadcasts of the Metropolitan Opera on rainy Saturday afternoons. Her first experience with opera? A production of La Boheme at Columbia's Township Auditorium. While a student at Dreher High School, she worked on a production of the real Barber of Seville, directed by Sidney Palmer.

With theatre as her first love, Schlaefer worked at Town Theatre and Workshop Theatre. After earning a bachelor's degree in English from Davidson College's honors college, she completed her MFA in theatre directing from Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., where she began her career by accident, working with the Washington Opera at the Kennedy Center.

"I thought I would be there just a year or two, but the more I heard opera and participated in the process, the more I got hooked," Schlaefer said. "Now, over 25 years later, I've been fortunate to work in venues all over the world."

As a national free-lance stage director, Schlaefer has directed or stage managed productions in nearly every region of the country, as well as in Italy, Jerusalem, and Germany. In the mid-1990s, she launched Opera for Kids produced by FBN (Fly by Night) Productions Inc. Opera for Kids, a nonprofit opera company that has introduced opera to more than 200,000 children.

"Directing Opera at USC gives me a chance to work and do things that I love at home," Schlaefer said.

And Schlaefer loves to sing the praises of her students at USC. The School of Music offers two master's degrees for opera students, one in opera performance and one in opera directing, and Schlaefer has her first opera directing candidate, Evelyn Clary, this year. Auditions are open to both undergraduate and graduate students, and Schlaefer casts based on the best performer for the part.

"We have wonderful students here, wonderfully talented young people. They're working as hard as a professional company would. They're totally committed," Schlaefer said. "I have so much faith in the level of talent that the students-both the singers and the orchestra-bring to our productions. In a four-year period, I want our students to have the opportunity to see or to participate in some capacity in as many styles of opera or musical drama as possible. Our program is growing."

Schlaefer also can draw on the talent in the School of Music faculty. For the fall production of L'Italiana in Algeri, by Rossini, she cast assistant professor and bass-baritone Jacob Will, a USC alumnus and South Carolina native, as Mustafa, a role he performed with the Zurich Opera in Europe. "It's great for the students to bring in a professional who is already here," Schlaefer said. "I'm also very pleased at the number of students who attend Opera at USC performances."

She's pleased, too, with the response from the University community and the Midlands. After her first production for Opera at USC in fall 2004, Schlaefer received "more e-mails, phone calls, and old-fashioned, hand-written letters" from people saying how much fun they had.

"Opera is everything coming together," she said. "It's the human voice at its most exposed and least protected, in the sense that you don't have any kind of technological backup. Singers have to rely on those little muscles in their throats and what their souls are giving them.

"All of it-the drama, the sets, the costumes, the music-combined with the commitment and total immersion by the performers result in the joy that an audience takes with them from a performance."

Images are from dress rehearsals of L'Italiana in Algeri.