Article from the Seattle Times, April 5, 2000.
Copyright © 2000 The Seattle Times Company
Neil Davis, production manager of the Opera Magic Production Company, had his hands full yesterday morning.
"Neil, he won't get out of my way - he's bothering me," said a makeup artist, pointing to a classmate.
"Neil, can you get the performers and herd them all on stage in three minutes?" asked musical director Terri Richter.
A short time later the house lights went down for "The Hike." Neil, 10, is one of 23 third- and fourth-graders in teacher Jo Vos' class who wrote and produced the hourlong opera.
The work premiered yesterday in the lunchroom of Seattle's Alternative Elementary No. 2.
"We rock!" exclaimed Annie Hogan, 10, after schoolmates gave the production an enthusiastic reception.
"That was fun. Let's do it again," said Michael Faigenblum, 10.
Set at Camp Bearwood, a fictitious summer camp in the San Juan Islands, the play follows a group of children who break camp rules by wandering off on an unsupervised hike. The older children dump their younger siblings, and both groups get lost in the woods.
Reunited during a frightening night in the forest, they declare their affection for each other and struggle back to camp, singing:
I'm glad we're back at camp.
We're really cold and damp.
We're tired and hungry, too.
It's an impressive production from students who seven months ago knew almost nothing about opera.
"Some kids said they thought opera was a big fat lady singing in a Viking outfit," said Holly Eberhart, 10, who plays one of the older campers and who heads the Opera Magic Production Company's public-relations team.
The children learned better when they saw the Seattle Opera production of Mozart's "Magic Flute." The role of Papagena was played by Richter, who gave the children singing lessons, helped them put the play to music and worked on details of staging.
"It's amazing what they came up with," said Richter, a soprano who also played Xenia in Seattle Opera's "Boris Godunov" this year.
"They were in charge of everything. They were in charge of lighting, they were in charge of costumes, props, the entrances, the lines. I don't think they ever had the experience before where they totally ran everything."
Behind every great children's opera is a great musician - and in this case, two. Vos's students also had help from composer, keyboardist and choral conductor Robert Kechley, whose son Murren is in the class.
After the students came up with words and melodies for the songs, Kechley helped them structure the songs. With two student percussionists backing him up, Kechley accompanies the play on piano.
Vos and the school's part-time visual-arts teacher, Cathy Tagget, last year attended the New York Metropolitan Opera Guild's teacher training on creating original opera in Cincinnati. They obtained a Nesholm Family Foundation grant, which paid for the work of Richter, Kechley and Tagget, the technical director.
The children have learned lessons in writing librettos, setting them to music, designing and building sets, building footlights, singing, acting and working together.
They've also been introduced to a whole new world of music. "People think that opera's boring," said Mayre Squires, 10. "We've learned it can be fun."