Backstage: Drama & Intrigue at the NJSO—Talking with Tosca
By Victoria McCabe
Kara Shay Thomson is in her comfort zone. It’s Wednesday morning, the week before rehearsals start for Opera New Jersey and the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra’s joint production of Tosca in Princeton and Newark in February, and the opera singer who will perform the title role is speaking from her Cincinnati home. And it isn’t the fact that she’s speaking while in pajamas or the fact that she is packing her needlepoint work in anticipation of the rehearsal space (more on that later). Kara Shay Thomson is in her comfort zone because she is about to become the tragic heroine Floria Tosca for the 28th (and 29th) time. And like slipping on a pair of favorite pj’s, it is a role she relishes wearing.
Tosca was the first role she learned as an apprentice at Opera North, after she graduated from the New England Conservatory of Music with a graduate diploma in performance. “She’s the character who has been with me longest—she lives in me.”
Tosca is one of opera’s great tragic figures, and Thomson has continued to discover new elements of the character in each of the previous seven productions—totaling 27 performances—in which she has inhabited the role. By February 2013, she’ll hit the 40-performance mark.
“At first, it was just being able to sing the role—that is a challenge in itself,” she says. “But now, I have this whole backstory on Tosca from the original play. One director gave me the play to read, and there are things in there that you don’t get from the opera. It’s really interesting. Tosca was an orphan, and she was taken care of in an orphanage because she was this great singer; then she became famous.
“You don’t know that the first time you meet her in the opera—the first time you see her [on stage], there is a door that is locked, and she can’t get into the church. Tosca is comfortable in church. I’m a preacher’s kid, so I identify with that.”
Tosca is the tempestuous opera star at the center of a tragedy. The opera takes place in a 24-hour window; a sinister police chief obsessed with Tosca concocts a deadly scheme to separate her from her lover, the painter Mario Cavaradossi, and take her for himself.
Thomson finds Tosca’s Act II aria “Vissi d’arte,” sung at a moment of great despair, particularly powerful: “She thought God was going to take care of her. She’d spent her life doing his will.”
Thomson points to a 2009 Tosca production at Sarasota Opera as a pivotal experience: “When I [first played Tosca], I hadn’t had life events that turned my life upside down. By 2009, I had lived more—I had a child by then. That’s when I really started to do more Tosca productions.”
She says the length of the Sarasota engagement created space for the character to grow. “We did 12 performances there over two months; every single one was life changing. When you perform that many times (and rehearse for a month prior to that), it changes you. You become confident in your role, and you can play with it a bit each night. When you rehearse for a month, you establish relationships and trust [with the others in the production].”
Stephanie Sundine—who directs the New Jersey production—also directed the Sarasota production in which Thomson starred. Thomson credits Sundine’s husband with the idea for a Sarasota rehearsal exercise that changed her perspective on the opera.
“When we started rehearsals at Sarasota, we didn’t sing anything until we read the entire libretto as a play. Everyone in the cast did their own translation, and then we went around the room and read it aloud. You could have gone with an established translation or done your own. When you do your own translation, you look at the verb form and see where it came from; I think it helps you really understand the language. It’s a very old poetic form of Italian.
“We read the libretto for two days at a conference table—we even translated the staging. The cool thing about that process was that when you left that room, you knew that everybody knew what was going on in every scene. When people come to see an opera, I don’t know that they know all the discussions that happen [when the company is rehearsing]. ‘Why [is your character] here? What is your background?’”
She has carried those insights into her subsequent Tosca engagements, and she is looking forward to collaborating with Sundine again. “Stephanie is a real brainiac; she sees things in different ways. This production has different people in it, and it will be interesting to see what we find together this time.”
Thomson is eager to perform in Tosca with Opera New Jersey and the NJSO. “The partnership [between the organizations] is fantastic,” she says. “There is nothing like singing with a live orchestra, especially for opera. I am so thrilled that the NJSO is excited to play for this production.”
And the fact that the production’s two venues—the McCarter Theatre in Princeton and NJPAC in Newark (the latter of which is a co-presenter of the Newark performance)—are different is exciting to her as well. “Both halls are amazing,” she says. “It’s more intimate in Princeton, and it’s larger than life in Newark. It’s still the same world on stage for me, but the difference is that at McCarter, I can really see people’s faces, and even though you have that fourth wall, there’s an energy you can really feel. And at NJPAC, you gain this massive feel, and your voice rings even bigger.”
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Through a unique partnership Opera New Jersey has with Springpoint Senior Living, rehearsals for Tosca are taking place at Meadow Lakes senior-living community in East Windsor; the cast is also living there as true artists-in-residence for the duration of the rehearsals, from last Friday, January 13, until January 29.
Rehearsals are open to Meadow Lakes residents, and Opera New Jersey Executive Director Richard Russell hosts three talks—an introduction to the opera, a discussion with the principal actors and a discussion with the technical staff—during the company’s residence.
“This is our fifth year at Meadow Lakes; it’s been a great relationship, and the residents love it,” Russell says. “They have a big auditorium, and we build a stage and create lighting to enhance the rehearsal process. Having the cast living at the community is really unique, and it’s been helpful—last year, we didn’t have to cancel rehearsals for snow because nobody had to go outside to get to the theater.”
In our chat before she arrives in New Jersey, Thomson says she is looking forward to her Meadow Lakes stay and the potential audiences who will observe the rehearsals: “I’m very comfortable with having an audience at rehearsals; rehearsing is part of the process, and if you mess up, you mess up. I like that people get to see you as a real person, in a ponytail and a T-shirt, learning and figuring out things like how long it takes me to turn around and see the conductor. It’s a real window into how you see the final opera. I hope people come.
“Most people only see the side of you that’s the performer and the one who wears the dress at the party afterwards. Opera—the whole process—is who I am and what I do, what I’m really passionate about. I hope people can see that not just in performance but in rehearsal as well.
“We live in world of perfection and recordings. Live performance is a whole different experience. When [other performers] are singing next to me, I can feel their sound buzzing in my chest—it’s so cool! I love that connection.
“My parents like to see rehearsals. They came to visit me one time and watched a rehearsal from the front row. At one point, I saw my mom tear up ... she hadn’t even realized she was crying. It can be overwhelming to be so close to the sound.”
Thomson is also excited for the benefits that come with living and working in the senior community. Her needlepoint supplies are already packed; she is working on a few presents for some future castmates and thinks she’ll be able to find some Meadow Lakes residents who share her interest.
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After she takes center stage in the New Jersey production, Thomson will head to Sarasota to make her role debut as the title character in Vanessa. “It’s interesting to be so comfortable in my role as Tosca and then go to something completely different,” she says. “Vanessa is in English, and it’s in a different time period. It’s still very tragic, but Vanessa is a very different character. She doesn’t wear her passion on her sleeve [like Tosca does]. It’s fun to have that contrast—Tosca is like putting on comfy pajamas, and Vanessa is like slipping into an evening gown.”
The next time she steps into Tosca’s comfy clothes is next summer, when she will cover the role with Santa Fe Opera, and she subsequently stars with the Kentucky and Portland Operas.
“For me, the most interesting thing about Tosca is that the story still holds true today,” Thomson says. “We’re all asked to make choices that sometimes land us in situations we didn’t expect. In the opera, it’s all magnified, because that’s the art form. Tosca is a through story, like reading a book. If it wasn’t still relevant to us in some way, it wouldn’t still be playing.
“And if anything, if you didn’t connect to the story, and you just closed your eyes and listened to the music, you’d be fine—the music in this opera is just perfect, just gorgeous. I love that it has stood the test of time. I’ve performed this opera 27 times, and I still get excited for every single performance. It’s the same for the audience—people come back to see Tosca even when they know exactly what happens. (SPOILER ALERT) I die, he dies, he dies. We’re always all dead at the end, and yet you find something new every time.
“It’s like going back to watch your favorite movie,” she says. “You know everything that is going to happen, but you find something different every time; I play something different every time. The role keeps growing for me.”
Opera New Jersey and the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra present Puccini’s Tosca on Friday, February 3, at 7:30 p.m. at the McCarter Theatre in Princeton and Sunday, February 12, at 3 p.m. at the New Jersey Performing Arts Center in Newark. The February 12 performance is presented in collaboration with NJPAC.
Tickets for all performances are available for purchase from the NJSO Box Office by phone at 1.800.ALLEGRO (255.3476) or online at www.njsymphony.org. Tickets for the Princeton engagement may also be purchased by phone at 609.258.ARTS (258.2727) or online at www.mccarter.org. Tickets for the NJPAC engagement are also available through the NJPAC Box Office by phone at 1.888.GO.NJPAC (466.5722) or online at www.njpac.org.
Photos by Richard Termine.