Students who perform in University Opera productions are used to dealing with props, costumes and backdrops.
Green screens, though? Not so much.
But the same type of advanced technology that makes impossible car chases seem real in a big-budget Hollywood movie like “Tenet” is making UW Opera’s upcoming production of “I Wish It So: Marc Blitzstein—The Man in His Music” possible in the middle of a pandemic. The show is an original celebration of the controversial 20th century American composer whose most famous opera, the pro-union “The Cradle Will Rock,” was shut down by the government in 1937.
As David Ronis, the Karen K. Bishop Director of University Opera explains, staging the show in traditional fashion, with multiple singers on stage together spraying droplets through the air inside the Hamel Music Center, would not have been a safe or responsible choice. A live-streamed performance presented too much technical difficulty and too many risks, as well.
So the students have recorded their parts separately, in front of a green screen. Green screen technology allows the show’s videographer to create customized backdrops after the recording is completed—and meld separate recordings together to create the illusion of one seamless show.
The scale of the production—four singers, a narrator and two pianists perform some of Blitzstein’s works, interspersed with letters, photographs and other documents from his personal archives in the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research, housed in the Wisconsin Historical Society—made it perfect to use green screen treatments for the first time.
“With video, you can edit things and have a lot more control,” says Ronis. “This was the most flexible thing we could have done.”
For Sarah Brailey, a graduate student who’s performing as the lead soprano in the show, singing in front of a green screen isn’t an unusual experience—at least musically.
“I do a lot of concert work, not staged work,” she explains. “In those situations, I don’t have anyone in person to play off. I’m creating everything in my head.”
The technology posed a trickier challenge.
“There’s an invisible barrier beyond which you can’t extend, or the green screen will take your arm off,” Brailey says.
Brailey and her co-stars also had to learn to lip synch.
For the show’s duets and ensemble numbers, each performer recorded their vocals separately, then were videotaped lip-synching their parts over the other singers, so the videographer, using green screen tech, could stitch them all together against one of Blitzstein’s photographs, or an intriguing visual background. For instance, in the show’s opening number, “Art for Art’s Sake,” four of the singers, including Brailey, appear to be standing and singing together in an art gallery.
“It looks like we’re looking at each other and gesturing,” says Brailey. “It’s more fun to watch than when we’re performing in Zoom windows like the Brady Bunch.”
During the in-person rehearsals and recordings, the cast and crew adhered to strict social distancing protocols. Since the singers had to remove their masks to sing, the production took one-hour ventilation breaks after each number, opening the doors and leaving the building. It was, to say the least, an unusual schedule.
“There I was, walking down Langdon Street at 9 pm, waiting to go back in,” Ronis jokes.
Another advantage of staging the show as a green screen/video production is the opportunity to dramatically expand the show’s reach. Instead of performing before a few hundred people in the Hamel Music Center, the show will be available to view on the Mead Witter School of Music YouTube channel over a 23-hour period beginning at 8 pm October 23, potentially reaching a worldwide audience.
“Every time I came into rehearsal, there was this feeling that we were breaking some new ground,” says Ronis. “It’s artistically fulfilling to open minds and doors like this.”