Here’s the daring set up of Thank You. NEXT!, Milwaukee Opera Theatre’s sixth commissioned world premiere in as many seasons:
In the intimate Tenth Street Theatre, home of In Tandem Theatre Company, the audience will sit very close to 11 of Milwaukee’s finest opera singers. One by one, each singer will exit to the theater lobby where a grand piano stands for use in preshow entertainment. There, to piano accompaniment by co-music director Jack Forbes Wilson, each singer will perform a different famous aria from the classic opera repertory, a challenging piece that will show each artist at his or her best. The audience will hear it through the wall.
This is, you see, an audition for a paying job in the opera world, the kind of gig these performers actually work extremely hard to land in real life, often at significant financial and personal expense. Subtitled “A Reality Opera,” the opera’s real drama takes place among the singers waiting in folding chairs onstage in the theater to audition in the lobby. There, to piano accompaniment by co-music director Maggie Rebers, they sing their private thoughts and sometimes engage in sung conversations while they, too, listen to the competition through the wall.
The singers play themselves. They dress as they would, carry their own portfolio and sing their own audition piece. Poet and renowned opera singer Alicia Berneche, a frequent guest artist at Skylight Music Theatre, wrote the script/libretto. Milwaukee opera singer Tim Rebers composed the original score so that it integrates the standard arias from the lobby, matching melodies, harmonizing or creating counterpoint and sometimes competing or deliberately colliding with the classic pieces. Sometimes the singers fall silent as, for example, when a rival in the lobby reaches for a high note.
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Artistic director Jill Anna Ponasik instigated the project with Berneche and Rebers three years ago. Much has changed in structure, and the characters have deepened, since the workshop performances a year ago at Carroll College, but the theme remains. “It really deals with the ambiguity of being a professional artist,” says Ponasik. “It’s the best life in the world when it goes right but the daily commitment and sacrifice can be really hard on singers and their loved ones. And there’s no security. The piece asks if it’s worth it. We don’t answer.”
Thank you. NEXT! previews at 8 p.m. on Thursday, June 23, opens at 8 p.m. on Friday, June 24, continues at 5 and 8 p.m. on Saturday, June 25 at 5 p.m. and 8 p.m. and closes at 2 p.m. on Sunday, June 26 at the Tenth Street Theatre, 628 N. 10th St. For tickets, visit thankyounext.bpt.me.
