December has been super busy and also a bit frustrating. Good stuff first: the Christmas Markets are fantastic, full of great food and arts and crafts, and I've seen just about all of the ones anyone's heard of. I've eaten all sorts of delicious sausages, crepes, melted cheese, perogies, salamis, soups, quarkballs (basically donuts made with sour cream), chocolates, and other things I can't remember. Yum! Sadly, they're all over now, but they sure make being away from home during Christmas less sad. My sister visited for a week in the beginning December, also a lot of fun, and I got to walk around more of Berlin that I haven't seen, and try out interesting restaurants like a Sri Lankan place I'd like to go back to. I've also managed to memorize Zerbinetta, which is great since Ariadne auf Naxos starts on January 2.
And now the not-so-much-fun stuff. We started rehearsals for Strauss' Die Ägyptische Helena (which I now am calling Hell-ena). The cast is wonderful, and surprisingly, mostly made up of Americans. The Helena is German and expects the world to rotate around her, but she has a fabulous voice so I'm not too bothered by her attitude (many of the other cast members are ready to kill her for being such a diva, but I haven't had any major run-ins yet). Our conductor, Andrew Litton, is lots of fun, American, always buys the wine at dinner, and speaks no German. The director, Marco Marelli, speaks English to the conductor, but not to us. Two of us don't really understand him, and the other girl doesn't seem to care, but I do. It's so frustrating to be told something in German, understand some of it but not all of it, and then after looking confused, have the director say the same exact thing in German again. I also hate having to always ask another cast member to translate, but it's what I have to do. I can't go from not understanding German to understanding it fluently just like that. I do get a lot of what the guy says, but there's only so much I can get at once, and it's not nearly enough.
I had mentioned before that we're in the whole show, even though we only sing in one scene. During a 3-hour rehearsal, we cover about 3-5 minutes of the opera. We do the scene over and over again, and we barely change anything. And if Marelli wants to change something, instead of just going over the one part, we start the whole scene over again. And then the next rehearsal, it ends up changing! It takes so much energy to be there, and he expects more with each repetition. By the time you get to the 20th rep, everyone's making stupid mistakes because we just can't focus anymore. We've been working on the show since the beginning of December, and we basically have seven days of rehearsal left before our first dress rehearsal. We still haven't staged half of Act I, and the elves haven't been put into Act II at all (and I know we're in it!). I don't know how this show is going to come together in time. However, all that being said, if it does come together, I think it will be a beautiful production. The costumes and sets are gorgeous, and I think it will be fun to watch even if the process is tedious. Hopefully we won't get booed like Tannhäuser did!!
I've had three performances of The Cunning Little Vixen. It is the cutest production – everyone's in amazing animal costumes, and there are a number of dancers. I am a grasshopper in the beginning and the end, and I eat leaves and play a violin like it's a guitar, and dance like an idiot. All that while being very green and wearing a grasshopper head that I can't really see in.
In another scene I'm one of two boys (well, more like a big boy since I have a padded stomach on my costume). We torment the vixen and get thrown back inside by our dad.
We had two performances yesterday, one on December 17, and one coming up on January 9. I only have a few lines to sing, but the music is fairly difficult rhythmically, and we have a conductor who doesn't think it's his job to cue singers, so we are always off. The audience would never be able to tell, but it's annoying to never get things right – as soon as one singer is slightly behind or ahead, we all end up singing it wrong. Oh well! I suppose if he cared, he'd cue!
January is going to be super busy. I'm singing the first 10 days of Zerbinetta rehearsals, starting January 2. I'll also be at most of the other rehearsals because of covering Zerbinetta and Najade. Hell-ena opens on the 18th. And then we're starting Elektra and possibly Carmen. The big news about Carmen is that we're no longer doing a new production since the director had to pull out for health reasons, instead we're remounting the old one. This will take substantially less time rehearsing. This is good because I'm already busy enough and will appreciate the extra time, but bad because I'd like to have a chance to really rehearse Frasquita before being thrown on stage. I'm also not performing the role until June, so I don't know if I'll be called to the early rehearsals. No matter what, they can't call me to more than 6 hours a day of rehearsals, so I'll be busy, but not that busy.
Not too much else to report at the moment. Happy New Year everyone!
