Singing the Sweet Song of Unjaded Talent : Opera Project Raises Students to New Heights in S.D. Schools

“Downstage cookie children, I need you to kneel down--and don’t kneel on the footlights!” stage director Jack Montgomery barked. “Chorus and angels, I need your attention. Don’t forget your ‘echoes’ when you’re standing in line waiting to enter.”

The children’s pageant, whether religious or patriotic, seems to be a perennial rite, unabated by changes in culture and consciousness. At Oak Park School in East San Diego, a cadre of more than 100 students has been working on a project considerably more sophisticated than the garden-variety pageant. They’ve been staging their own opera production.

During a six-week residency, three professionals from San Diego Opera prepared their charges to perform an abridged version of Engelbert Humperdinck’s popular 19th-Century fairy tale opera “Hansel and Gretel.” Their efforts culminated in four performances last week, three for their fellow Oak Park students and a final evening show for parents.

San Diego Opera appropriately calls this in-school educational outreach its Hansel and Gretel program. The local company’s longest-running educational endeavor--a pilot project was launched in the spring of 1972--is unique because it places the student in an active role. Other outreach programs either bring in professional singers to perform for students or prepare classes to attend a dress rehearsal of a complete opera in Civic Theatre. Hansel and Gretel embodies the “hands on” pedagogic approach.

“The kids do just about everything, “ technical coordinator Suzan Ortmeier said. “We had two art crews making the backdrop and painting props. They even made their own program covers. They do the makeup, the lighting and all the work a stage crew does--the professionals are here to supervise.”

Besides the lead singers, the members of the chorus, and the usual host of supernumeraries, four student instrumentalists assist music coordinator Heidi Lynn, who plays piano, to provide the opera score’s “orchestral” accompaniment. While fourth-grader Kaeleff Kuspa plays a few solo melodies on his flute, his three colleagues are relegated to various percussion parts and sound effects.

Though Oak Park is one of the 35 schools out of 110 in the San Diego Unified School District that actually receives regular music instruction--the fourth-graders learn flutophone twice a week--Lynn observed that Oak Park’s pool of instrumental talent was rather slim.

In the Hansel and Gretel program, the students are given a taste of working in the arts professions. “Every kid in the program has to sign a contract,” Lynn said. “They agree that they will be here, be on time and will keep up with their school work while they are in the opera project.” The regular classroom teacher has the right to pull any student from “Hansel and Gretel” who falls behind in his assignments, but Montgomery noted that no Oak Park youngsters had been removed for this infraction.

“I think that kids this age appreciate the discipline that is expected of them in a project like this,” Lynn said.

San Diego Opera’s Hansel and Gretel program is aimed at students in the fourth- through sixth-grade level. A school pays a nominal $250 to bring the six-week program on campus, but the majority of the cost is borne by the opera as part of its educational outreach. Because the company has but a single crew, only four schools a year participate in the program, but the opera plans to employ an additional crew next season, doubling the number of schools visited. According to San Diego Opera, the waiting list of schools who want the Hansel and Gretel program is long.

Because Oak Park only goes through the fifth grade, this production did not have access to more mature sixth-graders. But because so many Oak Park students wanted to take part, Ortmeier said, the staff added extra roles to the production--apprentice witches and forest animals--to give more students a chance to participate.

According to Lynn, sometimes there is an initial problem getting students to try out for the opera, even though their teachers prime the pump with pitches in their classrooms before auditions.

“If we can get positive peer pressure to work for us, then it becomes the cool thing to do. Some of the boys at first think that opera is too sissy, but then when they see that Jack is involved, it helps break down that image,” Lynn said. “Because a lot of the kids are shy about vocal auditions, I make everybody who wants to do anything in the project sing a few scales for me so I can find the singers I need.”

Finding vocalists is one of Lynn’s strong points. She did the musical direction for the Gaslamp Quarter Theatre’s current production of “Nite Club Confidential,” and when she is not recruiting for the stage, she drafts singers into the choir she directs at an Episcopal church in University City.

Montgomery also combines his daytime work for San Diego Opera with a stage career. He commutes daily to San Clemente where he plays one of the fathers in a dinner-theater production of “The Fantasticks.” A San Diego native, he recently returned from a six-year stint in Chicago, where he was a founding member of the Chicago Opera Theatre.

At Oak Park School, Frank White’s combined fourth- and fifth-grade class was heavily involved in “Hansel and Gretel.” Thirteen of the 19 students participated and played five of the principal characters.

“When I heard about ‘Hansel and Gretel,’ I knew I wanted to be Gretel,” pupil Liv Isaacs Nollet volunteered. “I knew there would be lots of songs to sing. My parents are dancers (Patrick Nollet and Jean Isaacs, both founders of San Diego’s ‘Three’s Company’ contemporary dance troupe), and my grandmother was a Rockette,” she added with the cautious pride of a child who has been taught not to sound boastful.

Classmate Brook Binkowski explained her role of the Dewfairy: “I’m supposed to wake up the animals. I sprinkle dew and flit around. If they had invisible wires, I’d be flying.” Because Brook has an unusually strong voice for a fourth-grader, Lynn dubbed her “my little Ethel Merman.”

Kwofi Reed has been at Oak Park for a little more than a year, having moved here from New York with his parents. He did not audition for his role as Hansel and Gretel’s father with a prepared song. “I just did a few scales for them,” he said with a shrug. He he has occasionally sung in a church chorus, and he admitted that having started cello lessons within the past year helped him with his part.

At 9 a.m. on a Tuesday, the darkened Oak Park auditorium was filled with children from the younger grades waiting for their chance to see “Hansel and Gretel” in its final form. Assistant Principal Carol Jean Spicer announced that the performance is a joint project of San Diego Opera and Oak Park School. Her voice was filled with that unique conviction reserved for educators whose idealism has not been beaten down by the system.

(In an earlier interview in her office, Spicer shared her enthusiasm for opera. “It was when I was a student at San Diego High that I had the opportunity to attend my first opera. I’ve been going ever since.”)

The curtain was drawn, revealing Hansel and Gretel playing in front of the brightly colored backdrop of a forest scene painted by the Oak Park crew. Unlike Humperdinck’s grand opera, this production used spoken dialogue, but many of the opera’s favorite songs were sung by the soloists and chorus.

The student audience was surprisingly attentive. They cackled when the green-faced witch, fifth-grader Lauren Waldrop, leered at Hansel and Gretel from behind the trees, and they burst into cheers when Gretel finally pushed the witch into the oven. Like an opera production at Civic Theatre, some of the voices in the cast were stronger than others. Fourth-grader Andrew Nevins as the Sandman had to hold up his cloth beard because it refused to stay taped to his chin, but he charmed his audience as he weaved about the stage singing the Sandman’s Song.

Montgomery has worked with older students in other cities’ opera education programs, but he is happiest working with these fourth- and fifth-graders.

“This level is really fascinating because the kids don’t have their minds closed to the experience. They are not jaded like high school or junior high students. I’m constantly refreshed by their openness to it. We don’t spoon-feed them. My pet peeve is people who go in and ‘want to do something for the children.’ We ask a great deal from them, and they really respond to that.”