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All told, it wasn’t what you’d typically expect to see on a Tuesday morning, let alone at a rehearsal for the opera, a genre often associated with pretension. Then again, the production — which opens Friday night at 7, kicking off Opera North’s 36th season — is titled, unpretentiously, Hoedown at Blow-Me-Down. Performances also run Saturday and Sunday.
“And that’s just it,” gasped Evans Haile, general director of Opera North, as he wrestled Zili — “the unofficial crew dog,” he called her — for control of her favorite stick. Zili won. Haile’s eyeglasses went flying into the grass.
“It’s meant to be an informal atmosphere … a family-friendly mash-up of great artists and great music, where you can bring a picnic, (buy) a lobster roll, and listen to Oklahoma or Rhapsody in Blue, in a unique summer setting,” Haile said, gesturing around him at Blow-Me-Down Farm’s antique buildings, which overlook an impressive vista of the Connecticut River. “It’s incredible. Like, oh my god.”
Glasses or no, Haile wasn’t wrong. It was heaven.
This is the opera company’s third year working with the National Park Service to make Blow-Me-Down Farm, part of Saint-Gaudens National Historical Park, into a “national park for the arts.” It’s also Opera North’s second year incorporating circus acts, with performers from Vermont’s Circus Smirkus as well as from the Brooklyn-based Big Apple Circus.
But this is the first year Blow-Me-Down Farm will hold mainstage productions for Opera North, staging Hoedown and, later this month, Gilbert and Sullivan’s classic comic opera, The Pirates of Penzance. Opera North’s third and final mainstage production of the season, Giuseppe Verdi’s adaptation of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, will show at the Lebanon Opera House in August.
“It is so liberating,” said Louis Burkot, artistic director of Opera North, about staging productions at Blow-Me-Down. Particularly with Hoedown, “there’s just an incredible physicality to the performance. The strength, the precision, the coordination of the (circus) performers.” The circus energy is infectious, he said, inspiring him and his performers to match it in their music.
He paused for a moment to listen to his singers, whose voices reverberated, angelic, throughout the 400-seat tent.
“Words!” Burkot called out, as a reminder to enunciate. “Remember, words!”
Hoedown’s variety-show premise, which will showcase circus acts alongside a selection of well-loved American opera numbers — by Copland, Gershwin and Rodgers and Hammerstein, and others — borrows from the old-timey American tradition of a traveling medicine show.
“Basically, it was a variety show … centered around a doctor who was peddling some sort of cure-all — snake oils, elixirs, extracts, tonics, sorghums, medicinal syrups,” said Jeske, of Big Apple Circus, who plays that doctor. “It cured what ailed you.”
Except that it didn’t.
“The doctor is some combination of a lecturer, a quack physician and a showman,” Jeske said. “And so everything has a certain effusion, a certain superlative nature that goes with the rhythm of pitching people on a miracle medicine.
“But I promise I won’t try to bamboozle you,” he added with a wink.
That kind of whimsy and spectacle — combined with the visceral force of opera and the history and bucolic charm of Blow-Me-Down — is what excited Mark Lonergan, director of Hoedown, about working with Opera North a second year.
“The power of the vocalists and the orchestra … just brings the circus up to a higher class of art,” said Lonergan, who is artistic director of Big Apple Circus. “These gorgeous voices just bring everything up into the stratosphere. It’s just a really unique combination of elements.”
But even familiar productions, like The Pirates of Penzance, can transform under the big top into something new, said McKechney, who plays Ruth in Pirates, as well as a Minnie Pearl-style assistant to Jeske in Hoedown.
“I’m pretty sure this is my favorite venue, like, ever. It’s just really interesting and unique,” McKechney said. Not only are the acoustics in the tent “bizarrely great,” but the experience of performing for an audience that sits on all sides — whose faces she can actually make out, unlike with blinding glare of stage lights — will also make for a different, deeper engagement with the audience, she said.
Macbeth, which runs Aug. 4 through Aug. 10, will take place at Lebanon Opera House, where Opera North has traditionally staged its productions. But Prosper Makhanya, who plays the character of Banquo in Macbeth and was at Blow-Me-Down Farm with the rest of the cast and crew on Tuesday, isn’t jealous: He’s too busy marveling at the Upper Valley, he said, both for its natural beauty, and for that which its residents cultivate, for example, in the form of musical theater.
“It’s just a wonderful integration,” he said.
As if to punctuate this thought, Zili’s stick went soaring overhead, thrown by one of her human friends. As she bounded by to fetch it, McKechney’s aria soared, too.
Opera North’s season will kick off Friday night at 7, at Blow-Me-Down Farm in Cornish, with The Hoedown at Blow-Me-Down. The show will also run Saturday and Sunday, with shows at 2 p.m. and 7 p.m. both days. Run time is 90 minutes without intermission. Rain or shine. Admission is $25 or $50.
Opera North also will stage The Pirates of Penzance at Blow-Me-Down Farm, July 26 to 28, and Macbeth at Lebanon Opera House, Aug. 4 to 10. For tickets ($15 to $90) and show times, visit operanorth.com.
EmmaJean Holley can be reached at emmajeanholley@gmail.com.