The Skylight demystifies its art form at the Hotel Foster

Let’s be blunt: Opera has a reputation for being scary. It’s a fact even Viswa Subbaraman, the new artistic director at the Skylight Music Theatre, admits. So he’s set out to shatter that reputation with Opera 101, a monthly series of events designed to make opera less mysterious and threatening to younger audiences, beginning this Wednesday, Sept. 4, at The Hotel Foster.

That begins with talking about opera in a fun, decidedly populist style – the way this 300-year-old art form began. “If you are looking for stuffy opera, this is not for you,” Subbaraman said. “And if you don’t bring your sense of humor, you may as well stay home.”

In a very real sense, watching opera is as hard as watching football could be to the uninitiated. If you don’t know any of the terminology, or the rules, or have any background on the subject at all, you’re not going to enjoy sitting down for a game; you’ll be totally lost – or worse, bored. Opera is much the same, and Opera 101 fixes that by bringing in local singers to expand your vocabulary and sing passages from famous operas (some of which you may remember from cartoon days).

Opera 101 is part lesson and part performance, with more than a few interactive elements to keep the crowd engaged. One of those elements is a trivia competition about opera and what patrons have just learned, with prizes available for the winners. And by the end of the Skylight’s season, in May, Subbaraman hopes to have enough knowledgeable regulars to build a 15- or 20-minute opera at the final Opera 101 event of the year.

Opera 101 is a method Subbaraman has experience with; he first put on similar events while the artistic director of Opera Vista in Houston. There, only about 30-50 people on an average night came because they knew about the event; the other half just happened to be bar patrons or walk-bys who got hit with what he calls an “opera drive-by.” The best part: over time, some of those unwitting victims became regulars themselves. He hopes the same happens here in Milwaukee.

He’s also familiar with the feeling of being overwhelmed by a musical form you don’t know enough about to understand. He may be presenting Beethoven’s opera Fidelio as the first work of his inaugural season with the Skylight, but the first time he saw it, he walked out in the middle of Act 1. Yet as he learned more about the opera, a tale of passion, corruption and courage about a woman who disguises herself as a prison guard to rescue her husband, he saw the beauty in it, and has come to love the work himself.

For those patrons who walk out of Opera 101 ready to try an actual opera, the Skylight is a good place to start in and of itself. The Skylight always performs in English – Fidelio was originally written in German – and its operas are often shortened or have their choruses reduced to a smaller size, a sharp comparison to the also-wonderful but more traditional productions from the Florentine Opera, which frequently use full chorus and orchestra and sing in the original with English supertitles projected above.

Otherwise, if all you want is a little culture with your brewski, keep coming in for Opera 101; Subbaraman says he’ll be there every month, ready to put class in session.

Opera 101: An out of the box look at Opera; how it works and why it matters is presented by Skylight Music Theatre. This week’s initial installment will be at 7:30 p.m. on Wednesday, Sept. 4; future installments will be at 7:30 p.m. on the first Thursday of the month through May (excepting October and January). All events will take place at The Hotel Foster and are free admission.