When you think of opera, what comes to mind? Shawshank Redemption’s Andy Dufresne playing a piece from The Marriage Of Figaro over the prison loudspeakers? Elmer Fudd singing “Kill The Wabbit!’ while hunting Bugs Bunny? Adam Sandler’s Opera Man character singing the news on Saturday Night Live’s Weekend Update?
As a soprano, Leah Edwards is familiar with opera’s place in pop culture. She’s also aware of how easily it is dismissed.
“I often find myself in conversations attempting to convert skeptics,” she told the City Paper. “In order to build an organization that is of and for our community, we have taken a significant amount of time in the last few years to pose this very question to our audience members. Here are some of the answers we have received: ‘Opera is … elitist, boring, not understandable, a fat lady in a horned hat, for rich people, not for me.’ ”
She has faith that these stereotypes can be broken. “These barriers are real, but not insurmountable,” she says. “Building enough trust to embrace something unfamiliar is a challenge we embrace. We value every thought, take time for consideration and adjust our efforts in order to create a better experience for every individual.”
Edwards’ love of opera began when she was 7 years old. Her parents took her to see a production of Carmen. The combination of music, dance, drama and design left her completely awestruck. Although she didn’t pursue opera until much later, it was her first memory of falling in love with the art form. Over the years, that love for live theater only grew, eventually making her Broadway debut as a member of Terrence McNally’s play Master Class.
It was a 2015 trip to Charleston that inspired Edwards and her husband, tenor Dimitri Pittas. So charmed by its beauty and hospitality, they returned a month later to make it their home. As they became a part of the arts community, they realized that there was a burgeoning desire to learn more about opera and musical theater. Upon learning that Charleston is, in fact, the birthplace of opera in North America, they embraced the serendipity and began creating Charleston’s first full-time opera company, Holy City Arts & Lyric Opera (aka HALO).
HALO’s mission is to engage the community by presenting quality art and artists in performances that range from large-scale productions to intimate conversations. Not content to put on shows, HALO has also focused on creating another avenue for discovering opera: education. Their Opera 101 classes cover basic terminology, popular operas and composers, detailed plots, historical context and in-depth analysis, all tied together with examples of great performances.
Over the past year, live weekly, judgment-free Zoom classes have been offered to a loyal local and national audience with each archived on the group’s website. Another innovative solution for safely engaging the community during the COVID-19 pandemic has been its Social Distance-SING! series. Born from a spontaneous driveway concert on April 16, 2020, the mobile concerts, affectionately referred to as “a pair of singers, a piano and a pickup truck,” offer an up-close experience of opera and classic musical theatre selections. They also feature un-amplified voices in an open-air setting and a TV that displays translations for selections that are in foreign languages.
For Edwards, the idea of the communal experience has always been the magic of live theater, “When the COVID-19 pandemic effectively shut down the performing arts across the globe, every artist I know went through a period of grief. For one’s livelihood, one’s very essence and purpose in life, to be deemed non-essential is crushing. That being said, …we were able to continue making art. As husband and wife, we were still able to stand face to face, touch, even kiss, allowing us to deliver moments of true escapism for our audiences. In the last year, our organization has thrived by stripping opera down to its bare essence: communication.”
As part of Piccolo Spoleto, HALO will present Social Distance-SING! at sunset at Colonial Lake on Friday, June 11, showcasing new and local Charleston artists. Edwards and Pittas will perform and answer questions about how you can become a part of reclaiming Charleston’s legacy as the birthplace of opera in North America.
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