Among the many wonderful events at the 2007 Classical Singer Convention in San Francisco, for me the opening evening activities were especially memorable. In between three outstanding vocal performances, Classical Singer announced the recipient of the 2007 Stage Director of the Year Award. As Mark Lamanna gave his brief acceptance speech—in a style that I have since found to be uniquely his own—the entire room became especially attentive and seemed to hang on every word. He spoke passionately about his love for music, art, people, and especially singers.
Lamanna lives in Los Angeles, where his efforts this past season included productions ranging from Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas to Johann Strauss’s Die Fledermaus, but I recently enjoyed sipping coffee with him in Princeton, N.J., where Lamanna was directing for New Jersey Opera Theater. We spent a great morning together as Lamanna shared more information about his life and career.
How do you feel that your multifaceted background as a singer, dancer, and actor informs your current work as a stage director?
I’ve been saying this a lot actually. I feel like my path has been about directing all along. When I danced, I loved dance, but I never felt like a dancer. I didn’t talk like a dancer. I didn’t think like a dancer. I didn’t like rehearsing
eight hours a day, silently, as a dancer. When I was a singer and I sang pieces I enjoyed, the music really came alive when I started acting.
There just wasn’t anyone to really pull everything together that was required to become a great performer. It was like you had your acting teacher but the acting teacher didn’t know anything about singing, and the singing teachers weren’t really concerned with it being organic (and that’s not to say that anybody wasn’t doing an amazing job).
But when I was about 28, I had this amazing acting teacher, who told me to stand up in class and just “go.” I had never really done that. I was always trying to do it “right”—and there were so many things to do right because I had all of these disciplines that I was trying to do right at the same time, and it was making me nuts.
My acting teacher’s name was Carol Fox Prescott. She said: “Take a breath, let your sound out at the top of your breath and seek the joy of your own experience.” If you’re not having the best time you’ve ever had—it doesn’t mean you’re necessarily happy, but the joy is in expressing everything fully, to go as far as you possibly can. I just flew.
She had me bring in musical theatre songs without accompaniment and just sing. If I didn’t seem to be having a great time, she would ask me what was going on. I would say, “Well, I was frustrated,” or, “I had an impulse
that didn’t seem appropriate.” She would say, “That’s what’s missing in the song. You were holding that back because you didn’t think that it fit. Try it again.” Suddenly my idea of what a song is changed because I had been thinking too technically. I didn’t want anything to affect the “piece.”
What I learned is that the music and the words had been playing on me inside the same way that music plays on a piano. The music’s there, the pianist sits down. If you play these notes in that order, the sound will be there. So what I learned is that when I trust my impulses—even if it feels like the impulse can’t possibly be right—if it’s going on in me, I have to let it through, at least in the rehearsal. Once I do that, the energy is there—and suddenly my voice had the energy that it required to sing the song. It stopped being like doing two things at once and became very organic.
So you would say she helped you find what had been latent in you by urging you to trust your own impulses?
Yes, and that’s what she does amazingly with everybody. Actually, that’s a lot of what I do with singers, whether it’s a concert, coaching, or opera. I try to get things out of the way right away. I’ll often start off taking in the group as a
whole and saying things along the line of, “I’m not interested in Mark’s fabulous staging.” I know it’s going to look great but I’m not a “blocker.” I’m more interested in them being alive, so I often walk them through what’s
really going on in the song first. Even if they’ll just be standing still and singing, it’s not the old “park and bark.” I’ll often say, “You will be standing and you will be singing but you will not just stand and sing.”
So even if you don’t move anywhere on stage, you are on your feet and feeling the ground underneath you. Look at the person you’re singing the duet with as a real fleshand- blood person. Look your partner in the eye. Communicate and connect. If you reach out to touch, actually touch the real person in front of you, it breaks this barrier. Rather than just picking up my hand and touching you, it’s making real contact. Singers do that, and their eyes change and their bellies open. I say, “Yes! Now sing.” They sing and say, “Wow! It takes so much work.” Yes—it does!
What operas or shows are you longing to direct?
Well, The Magic Flute is being done right here at New Jersey Opera Theater. My partner, Brent McMunn, is conducting it and my good friend Scott Altman is directing it. I would love to direct The Magic Flute somewhere. You know how we have these lifelong references? Mine are Bewitched and The Wizard of Oz. These shows informed my sensibility at a young age, and things that have fantastical elements just enliven me. Oh, and Madame Butterfly! I’m longing to do a “Butterfly” that is all about paper.
With an origami connection?
Yes with the delicacy of paper. I’ve thought about this a lot here lately, envisioning it, because you do that in your director fantasies. You envision these things, imagining how visceral a tiny paper house would actually be, because you get it in the pit of your gut. Let’s see—The Most Happy Fella. I don’t care if “Happy Fella” is an opera or musical comedy. Whatever you call it, I’d love to do it. Oh, there are lots of things!
Do you approach musical theatre in a different way than opera?
Yes and no. I find myself, through sheer need, when I’m rehearsing, to break ideas that I don’t believe are true. When we’re doing the musical theatre concert at New Jersey Opera Theatre, most of the singers think that they should sing holding back their voices because, “musical theatre singers do it all with microphones and we’re not using microphones.” I say, “Wait a minute. Half the songs in this concert were originally done on a Broadway stage in a 1,500-seat house over an orchestra with no microphones, and it still sounded like English. You heard every word.”
There is always surprise that singing is hard work. I don’t want to do anything that is dependent on microphones. Yes, you have to use microphones in many theaters, but I like the most minimal version. I like the sound of the human voice. My bigger answer is that the music determines the approach that I take for each piece, and I direct singers based on how it feels to sing that actual music.
Do you have any advice or words of wisdom to share with singers?
Well, advice I’m not so sure about. How about if I just share?
I believe in the cells of my bone marrow that the world is hungry. We’re all hungry and it doesn’t matter what era or time period. There’s always so much going on in the world. My mother died almost fi ve years ago, and living through her dying helped even more for me to strip away anything that doesn’t really last, because things that don’t last don’t really matter. What matters is what we give each other. When you think like that, it doesn’t matter if you’re singing for 2,000 people or 200. It doesn’t matter what the room is or how great the lighting is. It’s the people right here in this moment.
Your ideas are so refreshing! Is there anything else you would like to share?
I want to say that I love working with singers. I think that singers are a special breed. You know, when I was young I used to see posters in students’ apartments. The dancers had posters that said, “You are the instrument.” The actors had posters that said, “You are the art.” Nobody alone is that—so I just look at what is particularly interesting about each group. And I think that speaking the truth and singing the truth always requires a kind of honesty and a kind of risk taking that always gives more life. You have to give yourself more life in order to let that out, which means you’re inviting other people to really listen, which opens them as well. There is way too much that invites us to be shallow. I think that it takes a lot of courage to bring your depth to other people in any way. Singers bringing music to an audience they don’t know, trusting that the audience will go with them—I could be with that the rest of my life.
I used to think that my performing was going to give me things that I had always wanted. I thought that it was going to give me family, in a certain sense. I thought that it was going to land me in a place where I thought that some aspect of my life was going to be set. When I got some of those jobs, I realized that they don’t give you those things.
Many years later I realized—and I really mean this—we’re not here to get things. We are here to give what we have to offer. I think that the fear is that if you are truly who you are you won’t fit in anywhere and no one will recognize you. What I’m saying is that when you recognize yourself, the people that need you will be drawn to you. You will be drawn to where you belong at that moment, and you will give what you have to those people. Life will do its thing and you will find where you are supposed to be.
If you told me four years ago that we were going to be having this conversation I would have told you were nuts. If it were 10 years ago, I would have said you were certifiably crazy—but “life is what happens while you are making other plans.”
Life is today not 10 years from now.
Yes! Yes! It makes me crazy when I hear someone say during rehearsal, “Oh—you know I really wish I was . . . ” That’s just wayward envy. It would be like you and me having this conversation but one or both of us would rather be someplace else.
It seems that these days so often we can’t even eat dinner with someone because we get a phone call from our “friends”!
Yes [laughing]. Be where you are right now. The other day I was feeling momentarily frustrated, and then I overheard a conversation between two singers who I am now working with but I hadn’t met at that time. One asked, “Who’s singing such and such in the show?” When she heard who the other singer was, she said, “Oh it’s one of my favorite songs. She’s gonna sound so great.” It made me so happy—there was such generosity in it, and it gave me the energy to go back and do the work I had to do at that moment.
You can reach Mark Lamanna at mplamanna@aol.com.
