Singing a Different Tune : After a Look Inside Opera, Youths Say It’s Not So Bad After All

Baritone John Atkins is a regular guy--he likes baseball and the beach. And opera is regular music, he told a group of Long Beach teen-agers.

“Lots of people think opera is a fat woman or fat man sitting on stage, singing as loudly as they can about nothing that you can relate to,” the slender Atkins recently told the choir at Wilson High School.

“But it’s not like that.” Opera can be passionate and dramatic, he said, and besides, no one in the cast of his current opera is fat.

Atkins, 34, plays the villain Pietro in the Long Beach Opera production of Giuseppe Verdi’s “Simon Boccanegra,” opening today at the Terrace Theater.

His presentation to the students was part of Inside Opera, a new program sponsored by the Long Beach Opera at Wilson and Jordan high schools. The students hear historians, meet the actors, see a performance and talk with a critic.

The opera company also sponsors a program for students from Will J. Reid High, an alternative school for teen-agers at risk of dropping out of school. Four students from Reid have spent three weeks making props and sewing costumes for the production of “Simon Boccanegra.”

The 19th-Century Italian opera provides the students with plenty of contemporary topics--murder, political intrigue, secret identities and, of course, love.

Atkins and Roy Stevens, another baritone who plays a villain, spent 45 minutes at Wilson High recently with a chorus class, describing their careers, answering questions and occasionally bursting into song.

“They see you on stage (after the presentation) and they see a connection,” Atkins said. “These outreach programs provide a way of showing that opera is relevant and we are real people.”

The program opens the door to culture for the students, he said. “It’s a great thing to introduce kids to music that’s different from what they hear on the radio, to somehow make it accessible, especially with all the cuts in the arts education programs.”

Opera can be very enriching, he told the students. “It feeds my soul. It makes me happy. It gives me something I can’t get anywhere else.”

But he cautioned them about choosing singing as a career. “You go to law school, you get a job as a lawyer. You go to engineering school, you get a job as an engineer. You go to music school, you get a job as a waiter--and try to work as a vocalist.”

In the history portion of the program, Jan Visser, retired professor of Latin American history at Los Angeles City College, lectured students at both Wilson and Jordan on the background of “Simon Boccanegra.”

Through most of the talk at Wilson the students slumped in their chairs in the hot auditorium, polite but unenthusiastic.

He encouraged the boys to identify with one of the characters.

“Imagine you were in love with a young woman, and you learned she was having a cozy relationship with a man twice her age,” he said. “And imagine that her father had killed your father. Could you still marry her?”

Student interest appeared to perk up.

He also told them how music sustained him when, as a Jewish teen-ager in Holland, he was imprisoned in a Nazi concentration camp during World War II.

On several occasions he was allowed to hear the music of Johann Strauss, which “soothed my pain until the next morning,” Visser said. “Music has always been, to me, a life support.”

The Reid students have employed a hands-on approach to learning about opera, by making swords, shields, costumes and torches for today’s production. Their jobs as paid technicians have piqued their interest in the theater.

“I never knew what opera was until this month, and now I love it,” said Aracelia Perez, 18. She plans to major in theater arts at Cal State Long Beach next year, she said.

At Jordan High, Dr. Don Para, chairman of the music department at Cal State Long Beach, spoke with a history class on the art and history of opera.

As he described a picture of the genre from the 12th Century to Verdi’s 18th-Century works, he played excerpts from various operas.

After an aria from Mozart’s “The Magic Flute,” sung by the Queen of the Night, students responded enthusiastically.

“It didn’t sound like a human voice,” said Taggy Lee Mermis, 16. “It sounded like a musical instrument. It was really powerful--it gave me the shivers.”

Mermis, who said the closest thing to opera she has seen is “Phantom of the Opera,” will attend “Simon Boccanegra” with her classmates today.

Ryan Hiscocks, 17, who plays electric guitar, also will be there. He found the opera program beneficial. “It opens people’s minds to new experiences, definitely,” he said.

2 PERFORMANCES

The Long Beach Opera’s production of Giuseppe Verdi’s “Simon Boccanegra” will be performed at 4 p.m. today and 8 p.m. Wednesday at the Terrace Theater, 300 E. Ocean Blvd., Long Beach. Today’s performance is sold out. For information call (310) 436-3661.