Copious Notes

Tai-Kristin Smedley is Ti Moune, Luther Lewis III is Agwe, Manuel Castillo is Armand, and Taylor Eldred is Andrea in SummerFest's production of "Once on This Island" at the Arboretum on Alumni Drive July 22-26. Photos by Rich Copley | LexGo.com.

University of Kentucky opera singers aren’t developing their musical theater skills only at It’s a Grand Night for Singing.

This week, in Once on This Island, ­SummerFest fans will see students’ increasing ­efforts to diversify their talents.

While many of their ­colleagues in the UK School of Music headed off to summer festivals, workshops and other programs across the country and overseas, four students stayed in Lexington to be part of the cast of the musical, based in part on The Little Mermaid.

For doctoral student Manuel Castillo, it is a first brush with musical theater.

“I don’t have a lot of ­experience with musicals, so I knew it would be a good ­opportunity to learn and get a little taste of it,” says Castillo, 35, from Guadalajara, Mexico.

For Taylor Eldred, the show is familiar territory. The ­Lexington native was in shows in the Arboretum when the event was the Lexington ­Shakespeare Festival, and she was in a production of Once on This Island at the School for the Creative and Performing Arts.

Margo Buchanan.

But none of those ­productions was under the ­direction of her college acting coach, Margo Buchanan.

“When Margo said she was doing Once on This Island out at the park, I said, that’s a great opportunity to be out there with the family,” says Eldred, 21, a rising senior in vocal ­performance.

Luther Lewis III, 22, and ­Tai-Kristin Smedley, 21, the other students in the cast, also got their starts in musicals, before immersing themselves in opera. All four students have sung in recent UK productions such as La Bohème and Lucia di Lammermoor.

“Vocally, it is not as hard as opera,” Castillo says of the ­musical by writer and lyricist Lynn Ahrens and composer Stephen Flaherty, whose other shows include Ragtime and Seussical.

“But there’s a lot of dancing and movement and staging, and it requires another kind of intensity in the acting.”

And there’s the point of getting opera students into musicals and on other stages.

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Byron Johnson of Jackson, Miss., won second place in the UK Opera's Alltech Vocal Scholarship Competition on March 8, 2009, at the Singletary Center for the Arts. Photos by Tim Collins.

Last Sunday was a good day to be a Johnson from Jackson in the University of Kentucky Opera Theatre’s Alltech Vocal Scholarship Competition.

Dione Johnson of Jackson, Tenn., was the first-place winner in the graduate division of the scholarship competition.

Taking home the graduate grand prize of $10,000 plus full tuition and a graduate assistantship was Dione N. Johnson of Jackson, Tenn. She was also the recipient of the Kentucky Opera Prize guaranteeing her a main stage role in a future production by the Louisville company.

The second graduate prize of $7,500 plus full tuition and a graduate assistantship went to Byron Johnson of Jackson, Miss.

In the undergraduate division, first prize of $5,000 and full tuition went to Elizabeth Maurey, a soprano from Brazil, Ind. Second prize of $2,500 and full tuition went to Keymon Murrah of Louisville.

This was the fourth annual edition of the competition, designed to attract students to UK’s voice program. Students must come to UK to receive the prizes. The impact of the event can be seen throughout the UK Opera Theatre’s current production of Lucia di Lammermoor as numerous leading singers are Alltech winners including David Bellamy Baker, Bruce Bean and Megan McCauley, who sings Lucia in one of the casts of the production, which closes Saturday night.

Here are the rest of the prize winners, as provided by the UK Opera Theatre:

Bio-Cat, Inc. Encouragement Award: Undergraduate - Keymon Murrah, $500; Graduate - Christine Jobson, $500.

McBrayer, McGinnis, Leslie & Kirkland, PLLC Audience Favorite: William Clay Thompson, $1000.

Anonymous Best Communicator Award: Jondra Harmon, $1,000.

Stoll Keenon Ogden PLLC Musicianship Award: Samuel McDonald, $1,500.

Powell ~ Walton ~ Milward a division of J. Smith Lanier & Co. Outstanding Transfer Student:
Matthew Gamble, $1500 plus a tuition waiver.

Mr. William L. Rouse III “The Barbara Rouse Kentucky Prize,” for a student born or educated in Kentucky: Ellen Graham, $5000.

Study at the American Institute of Musical Studies in Graz, Austria in 2009 or 2010:
Graduates - Dione Johnson, Byron Johnson and Samuel McDonald, $2200 each toward tuition.
Undergraduates - Elizabeth Maurey and Keymon Murrah, $1750 each toward tuition.

• Here’s our slide show from the University of Kentucky Opera Theatre’s production of Lucia di Lammermoor. Mouse over the bottom to get controls. Click on the little comment cloud to the left to activate captions. If you click on a photo, it will take you to a larger version of it at Picasa, and you can click the link at the bottom left for a larger version of the whole show.

Raimondo (Mark Elliott Golson, center) referees a confrontation between Enrico (David Bellamy Baker, left) and Edgardo (Jeremy Cady, right) in UK Opera Theatre's production of "Lucia di Lammermoor." Photos by Rich Copley | LexGo.

Lucia di Lammermoor is an opera about a man who forces his sister to marry for money.

His sister is in love with another man — in her mind, married to him. But the brother tricks the sister into a miserable arrangement. By the time the final curtain falls, Lucia and both of the men who called her wife are dead, the husband she didn’t want dying in Lucia’s ghastly murder of him.

It’s an odd mix: bel canto singing — beautiful singing — with treachery and carnage.

The University of Kentucky Opera Theatre’s production of the Lucia, which opened Friday night at the Lexington Opera House and has three more performances tonight and next Friday and Saturday, had the bel canto part down.

But the show never felt dangerous, even as Lucia staggered around the stage with a bloody knife in her hand.

Darla Diltz as Lucia.

We are, of course, talking about Lucia’s mad scene, after she has stabbed her new, unwanted husband to death and comes into the wedding party with a blood-splattered white dress. It is a tough scene for a soprano as she has to navigate a treacherous vocal line while holding the stunned party-goers in horror for nearly 15 minutes.

Darla Diltz has one of the most beautiful instruments to come out UK’s voice school in years, her tour de force playing Violetta opposite star UK opera alum Gregory Turay’s Alfredo. And that voice is on dispaly again in the mad scene, particularly echoing Aaron Sexton’s flute. But, except for a moment where she raises the knife to one of the guests, there’s never a sense that she’s going to strike again or that the party guests are afraid of her.

And the scene is hardly set, as David Bellamy Baker isn’t convincing as such a meanie that he would force his sister to submit to a life of misery. He only really has a sense of urgency when directly challenged by Diltz.

He too has had great successes, such as an empathetic Schaunard to Jeremy Cady’s Rodolfo in La Boheme last fall. Now Cady, once again employing romantic lead sweetness as Edgardo, does fix Baker’s Enrico with a death stare that means business in their big confrontation. He also pulls off one the biggest challenges in the tenor repertorie: successfully following the mad scene.

There are some other outstanding performances from the supporting cast, including Mark Elliott Golson II as a commanding Raimondo and Luther H. Lewis II as a deliciously slimy Normanno. Gavin Wigginson is a strong and gregarious presence in his one scene as Lucia’s doomed groom.

Director Richard Kagey has designed a strong traditional setting for the show, and the UK Symphony sounded as sharp as it ever has in the pit. The chorus was also in top form, bringing some of the best moments of the show, including the scene where they are supposed to be celerating Lucia and Arturo’s marriage and instead see an ugly confrontation between Edgardo and pretty much everyone else.

The show just wasn’t a compelling package, and the lack of drama, of any emotional spark was surprising, considering one of the primary strengths of UK Opera during its ascendancy has been acting. It has been a company sending singers into the world with the knowledge that opera today needs more dramatic flair to draw in new audiences. It has been the company that brought us shows like Don Giovanni with the Giovanni-Leporello combo of Mark Huseth and Corey Crider, a Carmen that, by all rights, should be a precursor to Brandy Lynn Hawkins doing the title role again and again and again, and last fall’s total package Boheme.

This is a company that has always remembered theater was part of its name. Let’s not forget that.

This show was double cast, with the cast reviewed performing again March 13. The other cast performs March 7 and 14.

• Did you see the other cast? Tell us how it went by commenting below, or chime in on the performance reviewed.

• This week, we bring you Live this Weekend video style, with the stars of Lucia di Lammermoor discussing the famous mad scene. Click play to watch the film.

As the plot thickens in Psycho, Norman Bates delivers a foreboding understatement: “We all go a little mad sometimes.” It’s meant as a general — albeit creepy, in context — assessment of life. But if you are an operatic soprano, going mad comes with the job.

The operatic repertoire features several mad scenes of note. The next two weekends, a pair of University of Kentucky sopranos will tackle one of opera’s most iconic scenes of a woman going insane as they take on the title role in Gaetano Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor.

For Lucia, “the mad scene is a release for all the torments she’s had to deal with the last several months,” says Megan McCauley, one of the sopranos who will share the title role in the 1830s Italian opera.

Darla Diltz, the other Lucia, says, “It’s finding a balance between being angry and delusional, which is really happy. I have to remind myself that if I was really crazy, I wouldn’t always be mad.”

Lucia is a victim of circumstances, forced to marry a man she does not love so that her family can maintain its home and position. To make that happen, Lucia’s brother has tricked her and her true love, Edgardo, into believing that they have renounced each other. Lucia goes through with the marriage, but as soon as she gets in the bedroom after the wedding, she stabs her new husband to death. She comes back out to the wedding party, her dress and the knife bloody and her mind occupied by wild hallucinations.

It’s 15 minutes that look ripe for theatrics. But the singers and director say they have to remember that this is opera. They have to be able to sing the soaring melody while moving erratically around the stage.

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