Arts Center Should Face the Pop Music : Country Singers Can Rustle Up the Emotional Range of Opera Stars--and Sell Tickets

With New York City Opera in residence this week at the Orange County Performing Arts Center, local opera buffs have been exposed to some of the greatest music ever written for the human voice.

From the pathos of Verdi’s “Rigoletto” to the wonder of Mozart’s “The Magic Flute” to Lehar’s playfully urbane “The Merry Widow,” City Opera singers have had a wealth of emotion and drama to mine.

Coincidentally, on Tuesday, the night that City Opera opened its Orange County run, another of the 20th Century’s great voices could be heard exploring the gamut of life and love--not at the Center, but a short hop down the Costa Mesa Freeway at the Crazy Horse Steak House in Santa Ana.

That’s where Emmylou Harris was wrapping up a sold-out, four-show engagement. And just a couple of nights earlier, the King of Country Heartache--George Jones--was holding court at Anaheim’s Celebrity Theatre.

And once again, we’ve got to wonder why these legends don’t seem to qualify as performing arts at this particular Center.

Not that there’s anything wrong with either of the places Harris and Jones played. Far from it. But it’s a continuing sore point for rock and country fans to know that their heroes have no place in the county’s cultural Ft. Knox.

Right now, the only way that singers like Harris and Jones--world class though they are--stand a chance of showing their faces inside the Center is if they buy a ticket to “Elvis: A Musical Celebration.” Or sign up to take the free tour.

It’s not a matter of salability: Jones drew a near-capacity crowd to the 2,500-seat Celebrity, and it’s not unreasonable to expect that the special-event aura of a performance at the Center would bring in even more people. Harris consistently does turn-away business at the Crazy Horse and, on previous tours when she has played the Pacific Amphitheatre, has pulled far more than the 3,000 necessary to fill the Center’s Segerstrom Hall.

The Center’s style makers seem to be edging, however nervously, closer to pop bookings--they just added a three-concert jazz series that will usher in Tony Bennett, Joe Williams, Nancy Wilson, Mel Torme and George Shearing. And coming up Friday and Saturday (hold on to your pacemakers) is the husband-wife singing team of Vic Damone and Diahann Carroll, who should be good for a couple of evenings of musical Ovaltine.

But why the continuing aversion to music with blue-collar roots?

It can’t be the quality. Emmylou Harris has a voice as pure, as other-worldly beautiful and as spot-on accurate as any opera superstar. (Lucky for us, she hasn’t felt the urge to try to prove it outside her genre like her old chum Linda Ronstadt, who tackled “La Boheme” in New York.)

For an encore at the Crazy Horse on Monday, Harris returned to the tiny stage with just a guitar in hand and began a delicate, haunting rendition of Dolly Parton’s “To Daddy.” Midway through this ironic and poignant ballad about unrequited love, the guitar pickup began to buzz. Instead of fighting it or pretending to ignore it, Harris calmly dropped her hands and continued to sing a cappella.

When a roadie rushed up with a replacement instrument, she waved him off and finished the song alone, like an ingenious painter who, upon wearing out his brush, puts the last personal touches on a masterwork with his fingertips. Now that’s musical drama.

It can’t be that Center officials won’t book country music because they’re afraid of looking too corny (otherwise they never would have booked “Strike Up the Band” or “Babes in Toyland”). And it can’t be over concerns that these singers have limited artistic grasp. Although opera singers are often challenged to pull authentic feeling out of plots or lyrics that read like parodies, I’m certain not even a Pavarotti or a Domingo could make a song as potentially hokey as “He Stopped Loving Her Today” into the monument to loss and loneliness that George Jones did.

So that just leaves the staging and the marketing.

The way I see it, we just need to dress these hayseed country singers in some zippy costumes and surround ‘em with a snazzy setting, and we’ll get ‘em into the Center faster than a $1-million donor being whisked into the posh Center Room.

They could resuscitate “Oklahoma!”--you know, lots of pseudo-country jargon from those pickin’-and-a-grinnin’ good ol’ boys Rodgers and Hammerstein--and line up Grand Ole Opry stars in the lead roles.

Or go one step better: Commission Andrew Lloyd Webber to whip up a new musical, a country opera based on the political intrigue and romantic machinations behind the scenes at the Dixie Beer brewery in New Orleans. Cast Emmylou as the overworked-but-always-smiling hops inspector. Jones would make the perfect self-pitying, suds-sucking plant supervisor, a Snidley Whiplash of a boss constantly resorting to chicanery to woo Emmy away from her true love: the handsome, honest-as-the Mississippi-is-long malt salesman, played by glint-eyed Randy Travis.

Throw in a few irresistible song titles to highlight in the ads --”Our Love Has Gone Flat (As This 3-Day-Old Beer)” and “True Love to Me Ain’t a Six-Pack and Corn Nuts.”

The Center would probably love it.

AND ONE MORE THING: Speaking of marketing, it’s refreshing (well, sort of) to see that fledgling suburban opera companies such as Opera Pacific aren’t the only ones that resort to sensationalistic advertising campaigns to sell high-brow culture. (For those who don’t remember, last year’s Opera Pacific ads played up “Aida” like a cross between “Days of Our Lives” and “Dynasty,” with a plot synopsis that began: “She wanted him desperately!”)

Notice the way New York City Opera’s ads try to make this centuries-old music sound contemporary and compelling, instead of dull and dated?

“Treachery and murder. Mystery and magic. Passion and love. Delightful tales and sinister plots abound . . . . This magnificent week of soaring music, masterful song and opulent settings is destined to be one of the most exciting and memorable events of 1989!”

Now if we could just get them to throw in a handful of half-naked dancing girls. Oh, that’s right--they did, in “Rigoletto,” Act I.