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| View from the supertitles operator's perch |
While I am mostly a music and theatre critic these days I have also been an actor/singer since roughly the late Jurassic Era and still do a show now and then. My current acting gig in Union Avenue Opera's production of Kurt Weill's last masterpiece, "Lost in the Stars" (August 17 - 25, 2018). This is the second in a short series of observations from backstage.
Observation No. 2: We're playing it Old School. There are no body mics in opera. When I first started acting back in the 1960s, nobody used microphones on stage. That may come as a surprise in an era in which even the smallest houses now use wireless body mics for everything but, trust me, back in the day you had to project and make sure your voice bounced off the rear wall of the house. It has been a while since I've had to do that, so it's kind of refreshing to be in a musical theatre piece in which all the music is acoustic. It's back to the good old days of projection and enunciation.
The somewhat unwelcome surprise for me was that I had gotten a bit rusty about the kind of projection and enunciation. That's especially true in the sections in which I have to speak over background music. It's good to have a chance to sharpen those skills again.
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