Soap opera seems to be a dirty word, but actually they are the most popular shows we have.
My grandad was an opera singer, my uncle a jazz musician; I was a boy soprano in the church choir. But the first performance with Deep Purple was something I’ll never forget. All elements were working brilliantly.
In Peru, there is no theatre that produces an annual opera season, and though there is one orchestra in Lima, it’s always struggling to survive. We shouldn’t have just one orchestra, we should have 15, we should have 50! And you should start to build this from the children.
I love ‘Threepenny Opera’; I was exposed to it as a little kid because my parents, my mom and my dad, had bonded, when they were dating, over ‘Threepenny Opera’ and introduced it to me, a child, who could barely understand it. But I immediately gravitated even from that early age.
My first time on camera was ‘One Life to Live.’ I mourn for actors coming up that the daytime soap opera is becoming extinct. It’s theater onscreen.
That’s the extraordinary thing about opera: it has the power to elicit a physical reaction. I don’t know if I’d have been any good or not, but I do know that I was never committed enough to find out.
Despite the rigid classicism of the famous Paris Opera school and company, the French have done more than their share to unmoor la Danse from its traditions and standards.
If you approach an opera as though it were something that always went a certain way, that’s what you get. I approach an opera as though I didn’t know it.
It would be nice to wake up and be able to walk to the bathroom. But even when I was 20 and at the Paris Opera, I had to crawl down the stairs; it is only when I start to work and stretch that my body begins to recover again.
I had opera training for three years, and I have three albums out. I also did a Broadway show. I’m an actor that sings, so it is in my blood. It is in my system.
Ironically, that was quite a bit of the appeal of Rumours. It’s equally interesting on a musical level and as a soap opera.
The Opera is obviously the first draft of a fine spectacle; it suggests the idea of one.
We got to see Sondheim shows, ‘Phantom of the Opera,’ ‘Cats’ and all sorts of stuff. When you’re 10 or 11 years old, it’s just magnificent. The story-telling, the music – it lifts you out of your seat.
Having now been on three different soap operas was more than I could have hoped for. Then going on to doing a movie and being on prime time TV, to my own show on Netflix – I couldn’t have dreamed of what this has snowballed into.
The performances of my works in the last 10 years are probably equal to all the previous years put together. There are so many venues now and there is a completely new public for opera that’s grown up outside of the traditional core opera public.
I’d hate this to get out but I really like opera.
Above all, I am an opera singer. This is how people will remember me.
Styx was always a theatrical band. In fact, we played City Center in 1983 with a rock opera, ‘Kilroy Was Here.’
Soap operas are like TV boot camp. You have to be able to self-direct, learn a ton of dialogue in a short amount of time, and deliver a performance in one or two takes.
I’m actually doing what I like doing, which is mixing opera music and classical music with soul and folk. And I was writing and talking about what I’ve actually experienced, and I don’t think that’s very common.
I never breathe through the nose, not when I’m singing. In the opera, you don’t have so much time. That’s fine at the beginning of an opera or after somebody else has been doing an aria, and you want to get a good fresh start.
I never dreamed of writing for concert or opera. I always dreamed, if I was a composer, to write music for films.
18th century opera is packed with emotion, but contains not a trace of kitsch. Only with the ‘thees’ and ‘thous’ of Victorian poetry does the disease begin to grow in our poetic tradition.
Dumb luck brought on the move from business to acting. I had moved to New York when I was 23, in the year 2000. On a lark, I went to audition for a soap opera. I thought, ‘Hey, this will be a really fun story to tell my grandkids one day, that I auditioned for a soap!’
The first opera I went to see was Maria Callas singing ‘Tosca’.
The opera always loses money. That’s as it should be. Opera has no business making money.
You don’t have to make a grand, exaggerated sound to sing opera.
I’m by no means an opera buff.
Opera is for a lifetime, not just a minute.
The opera in Los Angeles is excellent.
My grandmother will watch any episode of a show I’m on, but she watches her soap operas every day. When I was on ‘The Bold and the Beautiful,’ you would have thought I had won an Oscar. She told everybody at church that I was on her favorite soap.
I was a regular on ‘Holby City,’ and I did daytime; that’s how I started off. Off in Hong Kong doing stuntman stuff, then coming back to England doing daytime soap operas.
I was very young, and I was on vacation with my family, and there was a retrospective of old films, and one of them was ‘The Phantom of the Opera’ with Claude Rains that was in color. It was something very important for my career because I began to follow these stories that were morbid.
