It’s possible to go from zero singing experience to the stage of the Metropolitan Opera. I can tell you, because I just did it.
As a longtime audience member, I’ve always been intrigued by the grandest of the Met’s productions — the ones with a cast that far outnumbers the company’s chorus roster. Andrei Konchalovsky’s staging of “War and Peace” is the largest, though it’s almost never put on; more likely to come around is Franco Zeffirelli’s cinematic “La Bohème,” or Sonja Frisell’s 1988 “Aida,” which returned, one last time, on Friday.
This “Aida” is a holdout from theater’s big-hair days, when Broadway was decorated with the marquees of Cameron Mackintosh productions like “Cats,” “Les Misérables” and “The Phantom of the Opera.” The Met, too, seemed to operate under the belief that sets were as important as stars. Slowly, though, those dinosaurs are going the way of the, well, dinosaurs. Frisell’s old-fashioned “Aida” will be replaced with one by Michael Mayer in two seasons; tellingly, his won’t have any horses.
“Aida,” set in ancient Egypt, is an opera that changes registers of scale: an intimate exchange followed by a temple ritual or a triumphal march. Yet Frisell’s staging always towers, even in the third act — the low point of her production’s kitsch — in which a painted curtain, dotted with lights, is designed to give the illusion of a vast nocturnal landscape.
The biggest moment comes during the Act II Triumphal Scene, at the center of the opera. Egyptians return from war victorious, bringing trophies and Ethiopian prisoners with them. Squads of soldiers parade through the brightly lit set of temple facades and the pharoah’s throne.
That’s where I come in. Me, and about 175 nonspeaking actors hired for this revival.
Performers from various backgrounds had responded to a listing — Actors Access seemed to be the most popular casting source among people I spoke with — then they were asked to march across a rehearsal room. Picture “A Chorus Line,” but militaristic.
Gillian Smith, the Met’s director of actors and dancers, said that the day unfolded in a four-hour whirlwind: Those trying out offered their résumés, learned the “Aida” marches, and had their photos and measurements taken. In a brazen act of nepotism — or, rather, journalism — I was allowed to skip all this and go straight to the dress rehearsal as a proud member of Squad D.
But not before my own fitting. One afternoon in early November, I met Manuel Gonzalez Jr., a costume supervisor and designer, who clinically reported my measurements to a colleague: head circumference, neck to waist (and floor), biceps (flexed for flattery), forearm, wrist, neck to front (and floor again), chest, calf, ankle and, most dreaded, waist. He said that the Met hires a lot of actors regularly and keeps their figures on hand; but with this “Aida,” he added, “there are lots of new faces.”
Including mine. Unlike me, though, many of the people I met at the dress rehearsal hadn’t even been to an opera before. Yet there we all were, crowded in a dressing room like athletes as we changed out of street clothes and into costumes that could win any Halloween contest. Gonzalez returned, thankfully, to put on my linen skirt — with a severe, upside down V-shaped opening made modest by skin-colored spandex shorts underneath — as well as ankle and wrist cuffs, and midriff armor. The finishing touches were a pair of sandals and a helmet uncomfortably resembling horizontal cornrows. “Oh yeah,” I was told, “that’s a whole thing.”
Then we waited, with a large gap between our call times and appearances onstage. A Met employee, playing the part of a TV hype man, checked in by cheerily saying: “How’s everyone doing here? Having the most fun ever?” A few people, understandably, responded with perfunctory enthusiasm. But hasn’t anticipating action for long stretches always been the soldier’s life?
Things weren’t much different on opening night. Our call time was 7:30 p.m. — a half-hour after curtain — and by that time we were all more or less able to get into our costumes without friction. Luckily, a heavy Chinese dinner the night before didn’t stop me from fitting into mine. (Then again, Smith said, “Velcro does wonders.”) Inappropriate tattoos were powdered over, and wigs, which I preferred to call helmets, were adjusted. Some actors read books; others played games. One had his face immersed in the Weekend Arts section of this newspaper.
We were summoned with a call: “It’s go time! Squad time! Everyone follow me.” Then it was off to the Met’s stage level to practice our marches in the wings, down stairs and past the many signs that had been taped to walls to guide newcomers around the building. Dancers were warming up for their Act II performances, while the horses hung out with their handlers, sometimes dropping a stinky pile that was hastily cleaned up, away from the audience’s eye.
Members of my squad got to know one another. I received crucial help from Anthony Bradford, an actor who has done mostly film and TV, he said, but is now trying to add more theater experience to his résumé. To assist me in figuring out the confusing strap of my quiver, there was CJ DiOrio, a recent New York University musical theater graduate, for whom this gig was his biggest yet. His worry: “I’m nervous I’m going to trip.”
Neither of them had been to the Met before their auditions, nor were they familiar with “Aida.” Now, they were contracted for the whole revival, through the spring. Each performance, about two hours of work, a squad soldier makes about $41. (As someone who was taking more than giving, I wasn’t paid.) Experienced actors, however, they promptly assembled behind our squad leader — Germaine Franco, a 6-foot-something man made taller by his egg-shaped helmet — for a dry run of the march.
“Left, left, left, right, left” was announced with mantra-like repetition. We were told to keep our left arms down and straight, and to flex our right arms, which would be holding bows, to show off our martial might. After a couple of tries — the first was deemed by onlookers “C-plus” at best — we gathered our weapons and waited behind the hulking set. Some places were tight; on a ramp where we had gathered, Latonia Moore, the soprano singing Aida, rushed through saying, “Hi, sorry, this is crazy, sorry.”
We had been at the Met for at least an hour and a half, setting up roughly 20 minutes of our contribution to the Triumphal Scene. It was then, not long before we went out to march, that I thought about what might happen if someone needed to use the restroom. “Yeah, I try not to drink too much water before,” Bradford said.
The less thought put into the march itself, the better. There’s something about a person telling you to walk a specific way that makes you suddenly forget how to walk at all. “It’s not as easy as it looks,” Smith said. “That’s why I get very personal about the squads if someone tries to say something about them.”
Trickier, though, is what happens immediately after the march. The scene makes it seem as though an infinite stream of soldiers is passing through; in reality, it’s the same group. After my squad made its way across the stage, our bows and quivers were quickly deposited while Evelyn Herman and some of her teammates collected our costumes. Then the actors, wearing only their skirts, picked up trophies of war for their next trip. Once they returned, they were dressed in the dark, just as rapidly as they’d been disrobed.
A few minutes later, we marched one last time, to fill out the set for the scene’s climactic final measures. As is often the case with eye-candy productions like this “Aida,” the curtain, after dropping, is opened again to let the audience appreciate the tableau.
That was the first opportunity to truly look out at the house, which on Friday was nearly full. It’s a dizzying sight, something neither I nor my theater-veteran colleagues had ever experienced. The lights shone brightly on our faces as we saw about 3,500 people applaud — not for us specifically, but at least something we’d been a part of.
