The Voice of Stella Carries Her Far

One of the signs that a singer has established herself is when she’s found a role to call her own, a signature character with which she’s routinely associated. Yet it can be difficult to put a personal stamp on a role that generations of great artists have sung.

That’s why a new opera would seem to provide the perfect opportunity for a young singer to make her mark. But only rarely do things work out this way, in large part because fully produced new operas are few and far between.

Elizabeth Futral, however, has been lucky. She created the role of Stella in the 1998 San Francisco premiere of Andre Previn’s “A Streetcar Named Desire” and found the experience exhilarating.

“There’s no instruction manual, as it were. No one else has done it,” says the singer of the pleasures and challenges of creating a role. “You’re completely on your own as far as making the part your own, and there’s something truly wonderful about that, indescribable.”

What’s more, the critical community stood up and took notice. While the opera received mixed reviews, the cast was generally considered strong. Futral was hailed as a standout, eclipsing Renee Fleming’s powerful Blanche and Rodney Gilfry’s magnetic Stanley. The Times’ Mark Swed wrote, “Futral’s sensuous soprano and deeply drawn portrait of Stella proved the most interesting performance of the evening.”

“I don’t know that it was a turning point in my career, but it did give all of us a lot of attention,” says Futral, speaking en route from a recital engagement in Florida to her home in Chicago, where she lives with her husband, baritone Steven White. “There was tons of press. There’s been a lot of talk. It was a thrill to be a part of it, and I felt lucky to be on board and take that ride.”

This week, Futral re-creates Stella in “A Streetcar Named Desire,” which opens at San Diego Opera on Saturday. Joining her in the cast are soprano Sheryl Woods as Blanche and baritone David Okerlund, who sang selected performances of the opera’s premiere run, as Stanley Kowalski. Tenor Anthony Dean Griffey, another veteran of the original cast, will re-create his performance as Mitch.

At 36, Futral’s career is clearly taking off. In addition to the praise in San Francisco, Futral made her Metropolitan Opera debut in January 1999, also to good reviews, in the title role in the second cast of “Lucia di Lammermoor.” She also successfully essayed her first Violetta in “La Traviata” at Opera Pacific in November.

Her progress does not appear to be slowing. Futral will make her Los Angeles Opera debut next season (as Cleopatra in Handel’s “Julius Caesar”), and she stars in a new production by New York City Opera of Douglas Moore’s “The Ballad of Baby Doe”--in the title role that helped launch the career of Beverly Sills.

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Futral’s Stella was praised for vocal and dramatic richness. The astute performance, which is available on CD and video/DVD, imbued Stella with a quiet dignity, rendering her gentle and dulcet but not without strength. As in the Tennessee Williams play, she is caught between her visiting sister’s delusions and her husband’s brutishness.

Forging the critical relationships between her character and the others took a good deal of Futral’s focus.

“For me, the biggest challenge was the dramatic aspects of the role, not the vocal aspects,” she says. “Vocally, it’s not the most challenging part in my repertoire. It doesn’t span the full extent of my range. It’s fairly limited, but I think it’s perfectly limited in that way. Stella is a bit more of a contained personality. She doesn’t venture out. Therefore, it’s not strenuous vocally.

“Dramatically, the challenge was trying to find the right balance in this pull between Blanche and Stanley, which is her whole conflict in this play,” says Futral, who also reprised her role in New Orleans in March. The libretto, by Phillip Littell, followed the play closely, and the characters, in Futral’s words, “are etched out” through that well-known text.

“The music helped me to find the character, which it does in all good operas,” she says. “That’s the great challenge, and the great joy. I love that part of what I do as much as I love singing.”

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Her fellow singers confirm that she’s a strong acting partner. “She’s a fantastic artist,” says Okerlund. “She’s patient and understanding, and the energy she gives onstage is natural. Elizabeth is absolutely in the moment and totally believable at all times. It’s very exciting to work with someone like that.”

Then again, it’s also possible that Futral’s success as Stella is attributable to more than talent, hard work and the good fortune of landing such a plum assignment in the first place. She also had the advantage of coming from the very milieu in which the piece is set.

Futral was raised just “across the lake [Pontchartrain] from New Orleans,” in Covington, La. “There are lots of things that were really familiar to me, atmospheric qualities,” says the soprano of the “Streetcar” locale. “I think it gave me a little more insight perhaps. I know there were some comments [by reviewers] that they wished Andre would have used more jazz [in the score], but I think it’s very evocative of the area in its sultriness and sexiness.”

The daughter of a Baptist minister and pianist-flutist mother, Futral sang in her father’s church as a girl. She did not formally study voice, however, until she enrolled at Samford College, a small, Baptist liberal arts school in Birmingham, Ala.

“That’s where my interest began,” she says. “I began to learn arias and became enamored. Then I took the bull by the horns and began pursuing it.”

As so often happens, she was influenced by a particularly attentive instructor. “I had a voice teacher there who was my mentor, and she was the first who recognized my gift and potential,” Futral recalls. “She really encouraged me and I was very interested at that point, but I sort of also didn’t know what [making a career of opera singing] would involve. I was doing competitions through college and singing roles there, learning as I went along, which was the best way. If I’d known the whole thing from the beginning, I don’t know if I would’ve pursued it.”

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Pursue it she did, though, continuing her studies at the Indiana University School of Music in Bloomington. “It’s known as the opera factory of the Midwest,” Futral says. “We did eight fully staged productions a year there. It was a great learning ground, with lots of competition.”

Futral spent three years in Indiana, earning a master’s degree in music, with an emphasis in voice. She even did a few courses toward a doctoral degree, “but I really had no intention of staying. I was just trying to get into an apprentice program.”

The apprentice program in which Futral landed a spot was the Lyric Opera Center for American Artists at the Lyric Opera of Chicago. During the two years she spent there, she sang small roles in main-stage productions, covered larger roles and participated in outreach productions that were taken to schools and other small venues in the community.

“I don’t know how people make the bridge from school to career without something like this,” says Futral of the experience she deems invaluable and crucial. “This was an [annual] contract, and so you’re able to be involved in a learning process and a performance process without having to work a desk job.”

Since completing her time in the Chicago program in 1992, Futral has sung in a range of houses, including the Royal Opera, the Washington Opera and Santa Fe Opera. She has also returned to the Lyric, most notably as Romilda in “Serse,” Susanna in “The Marriage of Figaro” and Adina in “The Elixir of Love.” Gilda in “Rigoletto” is also a role that Futral has performed a great deal, both in the U.S. and in Europe.

Once before “Streetcar,” Futral created a role in a new opera. She was part of the original cast of Philip Glass’ “Orfee,” which premiered at Harvard University in 1993. That outing whetted her appetite for more new works.

“My experiences [with new operas] were both wonderful because both Glass and Previn were extremely humble about their work and thrilled that the work was being done,” Futral says. “Just having their ear gave a level of understanding that you can’t get with some composer who’s not around to query.”

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“A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE,” San Diego Opera, Civic Theatre, 202 C St., downtown San Diego. Dates: Saturday and April 25, 7 p.m.; April 28, 8 p.m. April 30, 2 p.m. Prices: $31 to $118. Phone: (619) 570-1100.