‘THE BEGGAR’S OPERA’: A LONG WAY FROM ST. LOUIS

By the time the Opera Theatre of St. Louis’ 1982 production of “The Beggar’s Opera” arrives in Los Angeles in April, it will have been performed in an apple shed, a barn, a loft and a warehouse.

“Three years ago, we played in an apple shed near the Mississippi River, down in Clarksville, Mo., 75 miles from St. Louis,” Colin Graham, artistic director of the Missouri company, explained this week. “The shed looked like a great old Hogarthian barn, and it held about 300 people.

“This spring, we are in downtown St. Louis, in the loft of Sheldon Memorial, a little theater holding, again, about 300.

“Then we go to Texas, where we will perform in a warehouse--the Boiler Room of the San Antonio Museum of Art. That holds an audience of about 600.”

From there, the company comes to Los Angeles, where it will perform (April 25-May 4) in the Embassy Theatre, a facility Graham described as “quite intimate, despite the fact that it will seat 1,600 people.”

After a working lifetime in opera, Graham, 53, seems unfazed by the daily adjustments of operatic life. A recent veteran of eight seasons at the 10-year-old St. Louis troupe, Graham, a native of Sussex, began his career as stage manager in British opera companies--Benjamin Britten’s English Opera Group and the English National Opera in particular.

One of the “happy accidents” of this St. Louis-Los Angeles collaboration, Graham noted, is that it is an occasion for a reunion between himself and Music Center Opera Association chief Peter Hemmings (the Music Center Opera Association is a sponsor of the 10 performances scheduled at the Embassy). Graham said Hemmings, as a young operatic administrator in London in the 1950s, gave him two of his first directorial assignments--Stravinsky’s ‘L’Histoire du Soldat’ and Menotti’s ‘The Unicorn, the Gorgon and the Manticore.’ ”

On this side of the Atlantic, Graham has been associated with Santa Fe Opera, the Metropolitan Opera and New York City Opera.

Although the St. Louis production of “Beggar’s Opera” was conceived as a touring production, Graham said that, except for an appearance at the Edinburgh Festival in 1983, it has never been performed outside the state of Missouri. “We are undertaking this tour with help on a matching basis from a 1983 challenge grant from the National Endowment for the Arts,” he said.

“ ‘Beggar’s Opera’ was the only St. Louis production offered to Music Center Opera because it was the only one available,” Graham acknowledged.

Since its first performance in London in 1728, John Gay’s “Beggar’s Opera” has never been far from the mainstream of operatic life, Graham said.

“Relevant? It’s never stopped being relevant. As long as there are greed, drugs, corruption and drunkenness in the world, this piece will be topical.

“But Gay put it together--John Gay never wrote a note of it, but only arranged, used and provided new words for 69 popular songs of the day--not only as social satire. He also was creating a revolution against the operatic conventions, in particular the Handelian conventions, of that time. His idea was to put on the stage characters that the audience would recognize as real people.

“Indeed, at least three of the characters in ‘Beggar’s Opera’ were based on actual, well-known people of the time.”

Graham has solved the issue of the performing edition by selecting Raymond Leppard’s realization.

“What has come down to us, historically, is a vocal line and a bass line, so there are many choices, some of them hugely different. We chose Leppard’s because it requires just eight players (guitars, percussion and brass). In our production, they are part of the cast, play a lot by memory and don’t need a conductor.

“In general, we don’t want this to look like a theatrical presentation. And we want to make the audience part of it.

“Our set, which consists of a large, two-level facade with a staircase, reflects that. It serves as both facade and backdrop.”