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UK opera students spend summer exploring musical theater

Rich Copley Herald-Leader Culture Columnist,LEXINGTON HERALD-LEADER | LEXGO.COM | sunDAY, july 19, 2009,Rich Copley

University of Kentucky opera singers aren't developing their musical theater skills only at It's a Grand Night for Singing.

This week, in Once on This Island, SummerFest fans will see students' increasing efforts to diversify their talents.

While many of their colleagues in the UK School of Music headed off to summer festivals, workshops and other programs across the country and overseas, four students stayed in Lexington to be part of the cast of the musical, based in part on The Little Mermaid.

For doctoral student Manuel Castillo, it is a first brush with musical theater.

"I don't have a lot of experience with musicals, so I knew it would be a good opportunity to learn and get a little taste of it," says Castillo, 35, from Guadalajara, Mexico.

For Taylor Eldred, the show is familiar territory. The Lexington native was in shows in the Arboretum when the event was the Lexington Shakespeare Festival, and she was in a production of Once on This Island at the School for the Creative and Performing Arts.

But none of those productions was under the direction of her college acting coach, Margo Buchanan.

"When Margo said she was doing Once on This Island out at the park, I said, that's a great opportunity to be out there with the family," says Eldred, 21, a rising senior in vocal performance.

Luther Lewis III, 22, and Tai-Kristin Smedley, 21, the other students in the cast, also got their starts in musicals, before immersing themselves in opera. All four students have sung in recent UK productions such as La Bohème and Lucia di Lammermoor.

"Vocally, it is not as hard as opera," Castillo says of the musical by writer and lyricist Lynn Ahrens and composer Stephen Flaherty, whose other shows include Ragtime and Seussical.

"But there's a lot of dancing and movement and staging, and it requires another kind of intensity in the acting."

And there's the point of getting opera students into musicals and on other stages.

Opera was once all about the voice. But trying to appeal to audiences raised on movies and television as well as the triple-threat world of musical theater has pushed opera to put an increased focus on developing singers' acting and other skills.

And it's good for the singers' careers to be able to do more than opera.

A desire to help students develop their musical theater skills was the impetus for creating Grand Night for Singing, the annual revue of show tunes presented by UK Opera Theatre in June.

And this summer, UK Opera would seem to have proof that it's working: Alumna Reshma Shetty is starring on the USA Network series Royal Pains, a show in which she hasn't sung a note.

Trish Clark, director of the Kentucky Classical Theatre Conservatory, which presents SummerFest, says UK Opera director Everett McCorvey "sees the big picture" and "says not all of the students will be opera singers, but they will be good performing artists."

UK Opera started working with the Arboretum festivals when the Lexington Shakespeare Festival launched its institute, and the opera program is now part of instruction at the conservatory, which was launched in 2007 because the Shakespeare Festival had closed the year before.

Buchanan, the director for Once on This Island, points out that as the cast is primarily drawn from the Lexington community, SummerFest is also reinforcing the town-and-gown concept championed by UK President Lee T. Todd Jr.

"It's really refreshing to work with people who you don't see every day and go to class with," Eldred says. "They're focused on the meaning of the show, having a good time and building a great cast."

But the singers aren't just involved with Once on This Island to have some theatrical vegetables that are good for them.

"It's a classic story talking about how love conquers death," says Smedley, who plays the lead, Ti Moune, a peasant girl in Haiti who falls in love with a rich boy. "It's a beautiful story."

The musical is based on Rosa Guy's novel My Love, My Love, which was based on Hans Christian Anderson's The Little Mermaid. There are no mermaids in this story, but there are gods, including Lewis, who plays sea god Agwé.

"It gives some history of Haiti and the racial tensions between mulatto-skinned blacks and dark-skinned blacks," Lewis says. "And it also alludes to the revolution in Haiti and the slaves' uprising against the French."

In the story, Ti Moune survives a storm, and it is believed she was spared by the gods. She comes to think the reason was to save Daniel, who is injured in a car crash right in front of her. Their relationship sparks the racial and class tensions in the story.

But this is not a night of heavy theater.

"It's fun and very family-friendly," says Eldred, who plays Andrea, Ti Moune's rival for Daniel's affections.

Buchanan says, "The Caribbean dancing and the African drumming really bubbles over, and the audience will love it."

Castillo, who plays Daniel's father, Armand, surmises, "It's very well done," sounding like an opera singer who thinks he found a good way to spend his summer vacation.