Many opera performers dream of a career that ends up at the Metropolitan Opera, but for Marc Verzatt, that hallowed house was only a starting point.
Our 2006 Stage Director of the Year recipient began his career as a dancer in the Metropolitan Opera ballet. After seven years there, he ventured into stage management, and then into stage direction. In the years that followed, Verzatt directed countless productions at leading companies throughout the United States and in South America and Europe.
Today, he keeps a busy schedule directing opera, operetta and musical theater, while teaching drama and stage movement at the Yale University School of Music and maintaining a private coaching studio. Mezzo-soprano Teresa Buchholz is one of his private students, and she credits him for making “a huge difference in the way I sing and perform.” As she explains, “He knows how to get me to really dig deep and truly connect emotionally with the text so that I feel that I am the character saying these words in the moment, spontaneously, not simply reciting memorized texts.”
According to countertenor Ian Howell, a graduate student at Yale, Verzatt helps students develop “a love for and a deep understanding of a mind-numbing range of repertory, a commitment to fully understand the music he directs, and a desire to get to the nugget of meaning in whatever is being performed.” He adds that Verzatt “is not satisfied to hear you just sing a song, no matter how beautiful your voice. Our time on stage is too sacred to waste by just singing; we have a higher obligation to understand what is human about music and to remind our audiences that we are all connected by this fundamentally beautiful experience of living.”
Verzatt is equally effective on the opera stage. A recent article in the Toledo Blade described him as a “hilarious live-wire director” whose methods include “cajoling, joking, and poking.” These methods clearly get good results. Evans Mirageas, Cincinnati Opera’s artistic director, recalls that during a June 2006 production of Tosca with Aprile Milo, Antonello Palombi, and Mark Delavan, Verzatt “elicited fresh approaches from each one of our stars” and “keenly observed what the performers brought to their roles and improved on it, with grace and tact.” Mirageas concludes, “It was sheer pleasure working with him.”
As a stage director, Verzatt has the luxury of being an audience member during actual performances. But in a recent interview with Classical Singer, it was his turn to be in the spotlight.
When did you first become interested in the arts, and, more specifically, opera?
I grew up, in Belleville, New Jersey, and my family listened to the top ten on the radio. My first connection with classical vocal music was an illustrated book of Gilbert and Sullivan songs for piano. The songs were so accessible. I hoped that one day I could see a whole production of Gilbert and Sullivan.
My cultural mentor was my aunt, who had lived in New York, was friends with people like W.H. Auden, and had once gotten drunk with Peter Pears and Britten. She lived next door to an actress of Polish German descent, Gerhild, who attended the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. My aunt worked with her on monologues and roles for language purposes, and she very cannily shanghaied me into reading lines with Gerhild. I’d always intended to be an actor, and this experience was a catalyst.
Gerhild told my parents that would-be actors required dancing lessons to learn how to move. And so I was enrolled in a weekly jazz class at the Newark Ballet Academy. When the class ended, the academy offered me a scholarship, and I studied there for the next five years.
As for opera specifically, it became my passion after I saw Joan Sutherland perform on TV. Before then, I hadn’t known that a voice was capable of doing what a musical instrument like the flute could do.
Soon I had a new ambition—to dance at the Metropolitan Opera. And I was lucky. After college, my first and only audition was for the Met, and they hired me.
Tell me about your transition from ballet to stage direction.
Eventually, I realized that I was no Nureyev. But I loved opera and went to the Met almost every night, whether or not I was in the performance. Once, during a break, I sat down with John Dexter, who was then the director of production. He said, “You don’t know anything about theater, but you know everything about opera. Get yourself a job as a stage manager and learn how a theater runs.” The ultimate goal, he suggested, would be to move into stage direction.
I took his advice and went to the Pittsburgh Ballet to try stage management, moved on to the Pittsburgh Opera and, subsequently, to the Lyric Opera of Chicago. While I was there, I was appointed assistant director for a production of The Merry Widow, in which the young artists were doing the small roles. They were having some problems with dialogue and dancing, so I helped them during breaks. Then the head of the Young Artist Program hired me to work with the young artists during the off-season. He believed in me enough to ask me to direct a production of Tales of Hoffman in Columbus, for which he was the artistic director. The following year, I came back to Columbus to direct Rigoletto. These productions were successes, so I decided that I was simply going to tell people from then on, “I’m a stage director.” And people believed me!
Eventually, I got representation, and I started working more. I took myself to Germany, and within eight days I was appointed stage manager/assistant director at the opera house in Aachen. I spent five years there, and then came back to the U.S. The Lyric snapped me up again as assistant director, and I started getting more and more directing gigs.
What are the aspects of stage direction that most appeal to you?
I enjoy bringing out the best in people. I hear horror stories about other stage directors who impose their will on singers and move them around like chess pieces. I am there to mentor, to guide. It wasn’t that long ago that I was a young kid in need of mentoring. I haven’t lost that feeling. I lead by educating, not instructing, and this process feeds my own curiosity, my own hunger, my own passion.
What do you consider your greatest accomplishment in stage direction?
That always comes from the most recent show I’ve directed, because I’m always evolving as a human being and an artist. It is essential that I know what the material I’m working with is about, what its point is—and convey that to the people I’m working with. When someone says, “That makes sense to me,” I know I’ve succeeded.
What was your worst experience as a director?
I did a Rigoletto with a baritone who arrived a week late, a pregnant Gilda, a loose cannon for a Sparafucile, and a Giovanna who was on the board of trustees but had little stage experience. When you’ve been through that kind of adventure, there isn’t anything to be afraid of ever again.
You’ve worked in Europe as well as the U.S. What differences between them have you observed in regard to opera productions?
In Europe, state subsidies allow for longer rehearsal periods. People go to the opera, symphony, and ballet on a regular basis. The time and the money are spent to ensure the best possible realization. Whether a production of Otello that’s set in a parking lot is worth six weeks of rehearsal—well, that’s up to the audience to decide. Here in the U.S. we’re frighteningly dependent upon contributions and donations and have a very limited time to get a show up.
Are acting ability and stage presence innate, or can they be taught?
Anyone can act. You learn from an early age to pretend. We need to teach voice students that they’re actors who deliver a script on pitches that are set, rather than simply vessels of beautiful sounds. This is a skill we work on. But it’s really about doing something that we learned a long time ago.
As for stage presence, there does have to be some part of your ego that is gratified when other people pay attention to you. There has to be the sense that when you’re on stage you have something important to share. Otherwise, you’re hollow. If you don’t have anything more than a sound, there is no reason why we should watch you.
How important is it to look the part?
I think it would be very difficult to actually cast an entire opera with singers in the age range the composer had in mind. You’ve got to be age- and color-blind in this business. You can’t sing Salome at 12!
That said, physical appearance is important. The audience has to believe that you are the role you’re playing. But, ultimately, I think that people will walk away disappointed from a performance where someone looks the part but can’t handle the voice range.
What’s your favorite operatic or musical work?
Whatever one I’m working on now! My current favorite is Eight Songs for a Mad King, by Peter Maxwell Davies, which I’m preparing for a performance with the Utah Symphony. Two weeks ago, however, when I was in Toledo, it was Romeo and Juliet.
Do you have a “fantasy opera” that you’d like to direct?
Someone just asked me to direct Werther, and I’m delighted, because “Werthers,” of course, don’t grow on trees. Let’s see. It would have to be in English and it would have to be a great drama. I would say that if I got a Peter Grimes, and I had a month to stage it before it went to the theater, that would be cool.
Evans Mirageas said he hired you for a production of Tosca because he “needed a director who was both imaginative and experienced at working with major talents, possessed of strong wills.” What are your strategies for dealing with big name stars?
Understanding that they are just as vulnerable as anyone else. They want to be loved and sing their best. A large part of my job is to be an enabler—to facilitate and allow people to do their best. Stars value this as much as any other singer does.
You keep a very hectic schedule and you’re often away from home. How do you cope with the stresses of travel?
If I hadn’t found yoga a few years ago, I’d be a chain-smoking alcoholic. A wonderful singer named Diane Alexander introduced it to me. She said I’d love it, and I didn’t believe her, but she was right. Now I can go to a place of tremendous calm right smack in the middle of the tarmac waiting to take off in a blizzard.
Many people view opera as a dying art. How can we interest younger audiences in this genre?
We need to get them to feel the same kind of passion for opera that we feel. If you can’t get your audience to weep at the end of Romeo and Juliet, then you haven’t done your job.
All opera companies need crackerjack marketing and development directors. People are scared to go to the opera because they are afraid that it will demand something from them that they don’t have. We need to make them understand that they’ll be enhanced by this experience.
What advice do you have for singers who want opera careers?
Treat yourself as a business. Ultimately, you are responsible for you. Trust the advice of one or maybe two people in your life. Otherwise, you have to be very selective about what you hear.
Never lose sight of why you’re doing what you’re doing. It’s like having a candle flame inside you. No matter what happens, you never forget it’s there, and you never let anyone blow it out, ever. Not even yourself.
For private study with Verzatt, contact him at marcverzatt@aol.com.
