By Jim Lowe
Staff Writer
Opera North, confronted with the COVID-19 pandemic, is moving Summerfest 2020, its 38th season of live performances, to its Blow-Me-Down Farm location in Cornish, New Hampshire, where it will produce two family friendly shows.
Once announced, they were immediately sold out.
“It is incredibly gratifying that when we were able to announce that Opera North would actually produce live opera with orchestra this summer, thanks to our unique outdoor venue at Blow-Me-Down Farm, that our audience responded so overwhelmingly,” explains Louis Burkot, Opera North’s artistic director.
“We are thrilled to be able to bring people together for the experience that only shared live performance can provide,” added General Director Evans Haile.
At 6 p.m. Saturday, Aug. 1, “Bluegrass and Broadway” will feature Broadway star Klea Blackhurst, with pianist Michael Rice, in her award-winning tribute to Ethel Merman, “Everything The Traffic Will Allow.” Opening will be the Plainfield, New Hampshire, bluegrass band Pooh Sprague and the Four Hoarsemen.
Mozart’s “The Magic Flute,” at 6 p.m. Thursday and Saturday, Aug. 6 and 8, will be performed in a concert format and sung in English with a cast of 10 singers and a 24-piece orchestra conducted by Burkot.
Opera North is able to present its Summerfest 2020 performances at no charge to audience members thanks to its donors. For both productions, New Hampshire’s COVID-19 guidelines will be followed. The audience will be seated on the lawn in physically distanced “patron pods” or in their cars.
Opera North, like all other performing arts organizations, was faced with canceling its traditional summer season. Founded in 1982 and based in Lebanon, New Hampshire, it is the only full-time professional opera company serving the tri-state region of New Hampshire, Vermont and Maine. While the Lebanon Opera House, its home for full opera productions, remains closed, the company had in recent years expanded to the Blow-Me-Down-Farm, part of the Saint-Gaudens National Park.
“Let’s look at what we can do,” Haile said at the time. “We’ve got this 38-acre property, we’re able to distance people, and we’re able to give them live entertainment. One of the most important things right now is not to lose that sense of shared experience.”
Opera North benefited from the fact that its development director, Maria Laskaris, was a member of the arts sub-working group of the New Hampshire Task Force on Reopening the Economy as the Governor’s Reopening Task Force.
“The arts were not at the top of the list, behind body art and massage parlors, depending on who had the most aggressive lobbyists,” Laskaris said. “Sort of a loose coalition of arts organizations across the state started meeting over Zoom to put together set of draft guidelines for this task force. I went to the governor in mid-June, and on June 28 he gave it his blessing — and the arts sector could open.”
Though not everyone opened, and major venues like the Lebanon Opera House and Hopkins Center remain dark, but it opened up the way for outdoor performances at Blow-Me-Down Farm.
“As to the public, we’re messaging a lot about mask wearing, maintaining that physical distance,” Laskaris said. “We really tried to use the best practices in terms of ensuring safety, and thinking how we could have 250 people. So we came up with this outdoor model that allows for circulation and physical distancing.”
The bigger challenge was presenting opera, even in concert version, while honoring COVID-19 protocols. The performers, spaced at least 6 feet apart, will perform from a 60-foot by 40-foot stage under a band-shell tent.
“It’s an enormous stage,” Burkot said. “The orchestra is 24, and all the wind and brass players are going to be behind a six-foot Plexiglas shield. The string players will all be on their own stand, and they will all be wearing a mask, and they’ll all be 6 feet apart from one another.”
Singers will have a 15-foot by 40-foot space in which to navigate.
“We’ll stage it as if they were going to be together, but obviously we’re going to have to modify a lot of things,” Burkot said. “No more than five singers will be on stage at one time, except at the finales where all 10 of them come on to sing the final choruses.”
Rehearsals are all outdoors.
“Singers are staying locally in individual rooms and get to and from by themselves,” Burkot said. “So we’ve really tried to cover everything.”
Burkot has cut the length of the opera by about an hour to an hour and 30 minutes in one act.
“I did my famous cutting here and there,” Burkot said. “There are some obvious things you can get rid of: the priest’s chorus, one of the spirits’ trios.”
Burkot has been coaching the singers by Zoom for the past three weeks.
“In fact, I tried two people together last night a cappella, having them just speak the parts first, and then we sang,” he said Monday. “We’ve been working pretty hard. And then we’ll start doing some minimal staging as if they were going to be near one another.”
The singers are members of Opera North’s Resident Artist Program. Since its inception in 1983, over 700 singers and 100 conductors, coaches and directors have participated in the program and some have gone on to major debuts at important opera houses around the world.
“The singers and the members of the orchestra are very excited about this,” Burkot said.
With these productions, Opera North may not be through with its 2020 season yet.
“We’re actually looking at some things we can do in the fall before the weather changes, as well,” Haile said.
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