Opera in the pandemic

“I Wish It So” explores the life and music of Marc Blitzstein

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One of the most fascinating characters in U.S. musical history will receive his due in University Opera’s online concert, I Wish It So: Marc Blitzstein — The Man in His Music. As with any performing arts endeavor these days, creating it involved a detailed safety plan, a pivot from live performance to recording, and an extraordinary amount of collaboration and communication.

Mark your calendars now: The concert will be available at youtube.com/meadwitterschoolofmusic for only 23 hours beginning at 8 p.m. on Oct. 23. It is a biographical multi-media show, juxtaposing excerpts from Blitzstein’s notes, letters and photos with 23 songs performed by five UW-Madison graduate students. I Wish It So was researched and written by David Ronis, director of University Opera.

“It’s just fantastic material,” says Ronis, in a Zoom conversation from his home office. For the past three years, Ronis has been studying the life and music of Blitzstein, whose papers are held at the Wisconsin Historical Society’s Wisconsin Center for Film and Television Research. 

Blitzstein is best known for The Cradle Will Rock (1937), a musical about the struggle to establish a union, set in “Steeltown, USA.” Blitzstein wrote it (and young Orson Welles directed it) as part of the Works Progress Administration's Federal Theatre Project. But a few days before the show was going to open on Broadway, the government shut it down and padlocked the theater, leading to a guerilla version of the show being staged at the Venice Theatre. The audience and cast walked 21 blocks from the original theater to the Venice, where Blitzstein played piano and actors sang from the audience. Tim Robbins produced and directed a 1999 film dramatizing the episode.

The Cradle Will Rock is only one small fraction of the work of Blitzstein. He wrote an opera, Regina, in 1948, and made much of his money from a translation of Kurt Weill’s The Threepenny Opera. Although he was briefly married to a woman he loved, Eva Goldbeck, he was also an out gay man at a time when few dared to be, and an outspoken member of the American Communist Party. He testified before the House Un-American Affairs Committee, but named no names. In 1964, while working on a commission for the Metropolitan Opera, he died tragically at age 58 after a homophobic hate crime perpetrated by Portuguese sailors in Martinique.

Ronis says Blitzstein was in the generation and community of composers that included George Gershwin, Cole Porter, Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein, and Leonard Bernstein. “Blitzstein is not as well known as them,” says Ronis. “A few of his shows were successes, but his luck and timing were bad. He insisted on writing the books for his own musicals, and they were sometimes confusing. But there is this wonderful body of work from all of these pieces.”

Staging an opera at all right now, in the midst of a pandemic, is nothing short of a miracle, and the significance of that does not escape Ronis. In addition to the usual responsibilities of directing, he had to work all the angles to be able to safely do it. 

Ronis says he had something much bigger in mind for the fall offering, but when the pandemic hit in mid-March, he realized the Blitzstein project was a perfect fit. 

“I had this in my back pocket,” says Ronis. “It only has four singers and the narrator and a piano — no orchestra. We could do it live, we could stream, we could do everything, because it’s small scale. But all summer as the university figured out how we were going to do school, it got pretty complicated because if we're going to shoot a video, how and where are we going to shoot it? Singers are super-spreaders.”

Ronis says University Opera got “special dispensation” from the dean’s office of the College of Letters and Science. He had to prepare a safety plan for rehearsing and recording in Music Hall that involved separate rehearsals for singers, who needed to be distanced from the pianist. 

“I would call the singers in for 45 minutes and they would work, and then everyone would leave the building and we would fling open the doors and turn on fans for an hour and come back,” says Ronis. “We rehearsed completely masked. I was out in the house, 50 feet away.”

As COVID-19 numbers spiked in Wisconsin and on campus, instruction went online and Ronis needed to renegotiate permission to rehearse and record; the project was allowed to continue as graduate research. 

When Ronis made the decision to record the show, the videographer, Dave Alcorn, suggested recording the singers against a green screen. That would allow him to edit them against various backdrops, including the historical materials that Ronis had been poring over in the archives. Ronis is especially excited about this aspect of the production. “It enables us to have backgrounds and environments for every scene, every piece. We're using some photographs from [the Blitzstein] collection. And we also sourced photographs from the Great Depression, and from the war years. With a green screen, you can integrate a person into a still photo.”

The cast includes UW-Madison graduate students Sarah Brailey, Kenneth Hoversten, Justin Kroll, Lindsey Meekhof and Steffen Silvis. Although they were recorded separately, all four singers will be edited together to perform a quartet. This was a labor-intensive process involving recording audio, then video with lip syncing. Ronis is developing new chops as a video director, including creating his first storyboard.

“All my colleagues across the country had similar situations,” says Ronis. “We get on Zoom calls and we're all exchanging ideas of how to do video. Just like everything else during the pandemic, it's been pretty labor intensive, but we're really tickled and pleased with the product.”

He says the student performers are also learning new skills, including how to scale performances for the camera. But for Ronis and the students who came to UW-Madison to study and perform opera, the best part of all is simply being able to do a show. “The gratitude quotient is pretty high,” says Ronis. “When we first met, there were some tears. They want to do stuff. And we were providing a way to do something creative and cool and learn new repertoire and learn about this composer and get a diploma. Despite the bumps and the challenges, it’s been completely worth it.”