Never let them see you sweat

Houston Grand Opera Chief Financial Officer Rauli Garcia gets a taste of stage life as an actor in Dead Man Walking

I arrived a little early to a new kind of chaos. Some new cast members had arrived …  I asked a super who they were: “the superstars, man,” he said. The principal singers were joining us. It was really cool to see that they looked like anyone else while off the stage. I’m not sure if I expected anything different, they were just hanging out. I also learned that the other supers who I thought were actors were just normal people like me. They work full-time jobs, and then come to Houston Grand Opera in the evening. They do it because they love opera or the stage life, and this is a good way to be involved. 



Artists arrive for the biggest rehearsal yet.



I went to the far side of the room to watch as people began to file in. The men’s chorus, children’s chorus, supers, musicians, singers, stage mangers, and the production team arrived in droves. I had never seen so many people in that space before.

We began to go through the first act. It was amazing to hear it so closely. It was loud, in a good way. The voices of the principal singers were magnificent.  I have heard Joyce DiDonato on stage, but hearing her up-close was much more intense. This is an emotional opera to begin with, and the singers look like they are really feeling the emotions as they rehearse. 

Later, we went through the scene that we had practiced with the entire group. The one with the synchronized steps (“Left, right, left, right …”). It became even more complicated when we added the chorus and singers. The music was so loud that I couldn’t hear the cue to begin my march. I was late, which made the other supers late, which made me nervous. We continued through much of the act. 

At the next rehearsal, the supers were called with just the principal singers and the men’s chorus.  We went through several scenes, and in my mind, I focused on the scene I have been concerned about: the marching scene. We went through it several times. Each time, someone was off. I felt like usually it was me, and I was missing the cue. I was starting to sweat! This time there were more singers, and more people marching, and yes, more complexity. I offered to step out of that scene, so far, I’m still there.

Isn’t there a way for me to put this into a spreadsheet?!?  That would solve everything.

A note about the patience I see in the rehearsal room.  Maestro Patrick Summers, HGO Music Director and the conductor of Dead Man Walking and Leonard Foglia, the show’s director, show boundless patience while putting the opera together. The process is very detailed. There are many pauses in the rehearsal process. Stage Management yells, “Hold Please!” and everyone stops. Then Patrick or Lenny ask for small changes to be made, we back up a few moments, and start over again. It happens over and over as they tweak and adjust the production into alignment with their vision. 

I, for my part, will keep my head down and continue do what I’m told.

Marching to the beat of the prison

On the night of our third rehearsal, a snowstorm raged in the Northeast. A principal singer was stuck in an airport thousands of miles away from Houston, and rehearsal was canceled. This was yet another first for me. What could have been just another normal evening at home turned into a private tutoring session with Dead Man Walking Assistant Director Kim Prescott. When it comes to movement, I need all the help I can get, and in this case I had missed two early rehearsals. How was I to catch up with my colleagues?

Kim walked me through my toughest scene, in which the guards escort the opera’s title character, prisoner Joseph De Rocher, to the execution table. All of us must march in lockstep with the beat of the music, in a very specific series of steps. Thank goodness for Kim—walking through it with her, I did just fine. What would happen, though, when I was on my own again?

That night I went back down to the basement for yet another fitting in the HGO Costume Shop. Again, Norma Morales and Myrna Vallejo  made me feel at home, and the session flew by. They snapped photos of my two “new looks”:

Prison Guard Look, complete with official badge and real keys.

Deputy Look, with an even more official badge. Rauli smiles sincerely at his bona-fide new identity, and gets character cred with his "deputy stance."

The night before my first rehearsal with the other “super” guards, I practiced my moves. Three new guards joined us as we rehearsed, and actors walked the principal singers’ roles, so we could get a sense for the whole scene. We marched through the steps slowly at first, and then moved in time with the piano. 

We all rehearse in a huge, three-story room in the Wortham Theater, without the actual set, since it is being put together onstage while we learn our parts. Instead, we work in a labyrinth of colored tape—what seems like miles of it—laid out across the floor. Each configuration of tape represents a different part of the set, or a scene or an act, and is labeled with some kind of secret code. It does take me several minutes to figure out that the rectangle with the lines going through it represent steps we will be walking up on stage.  Good to Know!!  How am I going to visualize the through these layers, upon layers of tape??

Rhythm and Effect

Chief Financial Officer Rauli Garcia recounts his second night as a supernumerary actor in Dead Man Walking.

During my first rehearsal as a stage artist, I happily played the role of a basketball player in Angola, the opera’s prison setting. Due to a last-minute decision from my doctor, I had to withdraw from this coveted role, not knowing whether I would be allowed to stay in the show at all.

Thankfully, director Leonard Foglia was concerned for my health and gave me a new role as a prison guard. Removed from the basketball game, I was able to watch my former colleagues “play,” this time with chorus members added to the mix.

I also noticed, for the first time, the number of non-performers in the room. There were several staff members from HGO’s stage management and music departments, each one with their own responsibilities for people, or movements, timings, or other mysteries into which I have not yet been initiated. I understood that rehearsals involve a level of expertise and complexity that I never before knew existed.
Every time something changed in the rehearsal process, it was as though a wave had washed through the room. A movement from the director or the conductor would flow through the music staff or stage management and into the performers until everyone was agitated like white water. Then, all at once, all would resume their places so the rehearsal could continue. This rhythm seems to be quite effective, even for such a large cast.



This rehearsal was the first chance I’ve had to hear the chorus sing this music—it was obvious that they had been rehearsing for multiple days by the time I heard them. They already sounded very good. I was shocked when Chorus Master Richard Bado stopped the whole chorus in the middle of their piece, pointed to one singer, and said he was three notes away from where he should be, demonstrating it on a piano. Out of twenty five voices, he knew just which one to fix. Wow.

Pick Me First!

Houston Grand Opera’s Chief Financial Officer Rauli Garcia is a supernumerary artist in Dead Man Walking this winter. Read on about his first night on the “other side of the curtain.”

It was the night of our first rehearsal and I was nervous going in. Walking into the rehearsal room area, I was surrounded lots of people wearing colored papers with their names in large print. Many of the faces I have seen numerous times on the stage in the chorus. It looked a little disorganized, until groups started to gravitate to their appropriate rehearsal rooms. I followed Brian Mitchell, HGO Archivist and often a Supernumerary, and about fifteen other guys into a room for the supers where we all lined up in a semi-circle. Director Leonard Foglia walked in and, with his team, began to sort us into groups with whom we would act throughout the production. Was I to be a prison guard? A basketball player? A court deputy? An inmate? A protester? I felt a little like a kid in gym class, waiting to be picked for a team. Where would I go? I did not want to be picked last!

The story ends happily—I was picked along with five others as a player in the prison basketball scene. Certainly an unexpected assignment. I did not expect to play basketball for my HGO debut!

Brian Byrnes, the Fight Director and movement coordinator, quickly organized us into two teams and began to choreograph the game. I wondered how this was going to work. How can a basketball game be planned in advance?



We stood in two lines across from each other, passing the ball back and forth. Then Byrnes threw in a second ball, so we were passing two balls back and forth at once. My colleagues were actors first, not athletes. In the beginning, balls were flying in several directions. Once Brian was comfortable that we could pass the balls without dropping them, we split into two teams. Separately, he asked each team to create two plays in which the ball started on one side of the stage, and ended up being scored on the other end of the stage. After several minutes of running back and forth, jostling and crashing into other supers, Brian was satisfied that each team had two plays they could run reasonably well. We were relieved. Getting to that point was a lot of work for a bunch of actors and this CFO.

After a short break, Byrnes put both teams on the floor and asked that they take turns running their plays against each other. While one team ran its play, Brian advised the other team on how to “play defense” without actually getting in the way. All of a sudden, in a remarkably short amount of time, we had a very real-looking fake basketball game. Next we had to check the scene against the timing of the opera score. It was close, a few more tweaks and the scene was set. Break time.

My doctor called during the break to tell me that I should not be running around and playing basketball as he was concerned that I might strain my back. Rats! Now I had to tell Brian and Lenny that I could not participate in the scene they had just spent two hours working out. What would they say? I had no idea. I only hoped that they would not banish me!!

Welcome to performing arts, Rauli.

Hello, I'm Rauli Garcia, HGO's Chief Financial Officer. One of my standard responses when someone asks me what I do has been, “I make sure the people who have talent get paid.” But I have never been a performing artist, never built a set or participated in the production of a show—how was I to know what actually goes into making an opera?



What if I were to observe the rehearsal process, from start to finish, as a supernumerary? I wouldn’t have to sing a line, as supernumeraries—or “supers” as they are called around here—are silent actors. I pitched the idea to Molly Dill, our Productions Operations Director, who immediately got a mischievous look in her eye as she played out the possibilities in her head. She cracked a smile and said she had just the role for me: a “prisoner” in Dead Man Walking. Both General Director Anthony Freud, and our Chief Operating Officer Perryn Leech loved the idea. The CFO, in a production, who ever heard of such a thing—but why not?



What a fantastic opportunity for me to learn about the art, the company, and process—I would immerse myself in the production process, and along the way track HGO’s funds from budget to final product. A main stage production gets rolling way before opening night, and in mid-November the production department was already casting the “supers.” I got offered the role of a prison guard in Dead Man Walking. It did not quite seem real until last week, when they called me to the Costume Department for measurements!

Down to the basement I went. Amid the hustle and bustle of fabric and thread, fittings and forms, lights and tapes, they quickly took more than 50 measurements! Clothes that are made for my body? How refreshing. Quite the switch from buying jeans off a table and hoping they will fit. Norma and Esmeralda deftly took my measurements, while Myrna and Mercedes poked a little good-natured fun at me, to put me at ease. It worked—I had a great time!

In the coming weeks, I will blog about my experience, and share what I learn. Feel free to leave a comment—ask anything you ever wanted to know about what goes on backstage in a world-class opera production, and I’ll do my best to answer!

Dead Man Walking photo by David Bachman, courtesy of Pittsburgh Opera

Scoring the Moon

David Hanlon, music director of HGO's world premiere mariachi opera explains what it took to get the opera down on paper.

How do you play mariachi music on a piano?

As music director of To Cross the Face of the Moon, one of the trickiest problems I had to solve was how to play the piano in rehearsals. Typically I draw on centuries-old traditions of rendering opera scores on a piano. But a mariachi score? I would have to figure out how to make it work on my own.

Opera pianists usually have a lot of help in rendering orchestra scores. Most operas are published in a piano-vocal score which features piano arrangement of the orchestra score. We might add, omit, or rearrange what’s on the page, but many of the basic decisions will have already been made by the arranger. However, To Cross the Face of the Moon would have no piano-vocal score. I would arrange it myself while reading from the full score: three violins, three trumpets, harp, guitar and bass. That’s nine staves to read from instead of the usual two. Even aside from the difficulty of reading all these lines at once and rendering them on the piano, I had to figure out the basic problem of how to turn the pages! The fast and frequent page turns would be coming at me two to three times more often than in a typical piano-vocal score. In some pieces the act of freeing a hand to turn would have to be as choreographed and rhythmic as a scale or an octave leap.

The problems of page turns and playing from full score turned out to be more fun to conquer than anything. As for making a mariachi sound at a piano, I discovered that it wasn’t so different from playing opera after all. The job of a pianist in an opera company is one of a translator. The composer writes in one language that of an eighty-person orchestra and the pianist translates that to the language of a single instrument. Along the way, you make decisions about when to translate literally note-for-note and when the spirit of the original is best captured in a pianistic idiom. This was pretty similar. Instead of an orchestra, I was translating the sound of a mariachi band. Most of my principles of arranging orchestra scores worked equally well with Mariachi.

When my opera head drew a blank, I could fall back on my experience of having played a fair amount of Afro-Cuban music. The genre feels to mariachi music as Italian does to Spanish: not the same thing at all, but similar enough to give you a feel for the overlaps in vocabulary. Most helpful of all, Mariachi Vargas de Tecalitlán made a study CD of all of tunes from the opera. It was invaluable. When I prepare a standard opera, I’ll listen to multiple recordings to get the sound of the orchestra in my ear and get a sense of the choices that conductor might make. Here I had a document of the very band that would be premiering the opera, led by the composer. I had a ball putting on my headphones and jamming with Vargas, trying to emulate their every nuance, whether it was the precise articulations of the violins, the rhythmic freedom of a trumpet solo, or the infectious rhythm from the vihuela.

The first day of our workshop on the opera, the cast and I ran through all of the songs. We got to the middle of one song where a huge glissando interrupts the music and propels it into a high-energy dance rhythm. The cast let loose with a few whoops and gritos. “OK,” I thought “this is working...”

Backstage Bravos

Every minute of a Houston Grand Opera performance reflects hours of careful preparation. The artists and technicians in the HGO Technical Department comprise five different teams: Costumes, Wigs and Makeup; Electrics and Sound; Stage Management; Properties (“Props”); and Carpentry. Artists and technicians work throughout the year on every detail of each HGO opera—from the special effects of a tumbling bridge to the hairs on every singer’s head.
This spring the Houston Grand Opera Technical Department celebrated the year’s achievements over a feast of Texas-style bar-b-que. HGO Technical Director Perryn Leech awarded one member from each department for their special contributions throughout the season.

2009-10 Technicians of the Year
Mr. “Cadillac” Bob Baker, Carpentry Technician of the Year
Ms. Mercedez Ramirez, Technician of the Year for Costumes, Wigs and Make-up
Ms. Terri Batcheller, Electrics and Sound Technician of the Year
Mr. Christopher Staub, Stage Management Technician of the Year
Mr. John Gorey, Properties Technician of the Year
The coveted title of overall Technician of the Year went to a joyful Mercedes Ramirez.


Photo credit: Megan