The School of Music to perform ‘Love is a Plaintive Song’ opera scene show on Friday, Oct. 29 at 8 p.m. and Saturday, Oct. 30 at 5 p.m. in the Timashev Recital Hall with music from Bernstein, Gilbert & Sullivan, Rodgers & Hammerstein, Mozart, Adamo, Sondheim, Bizet and Humperdinck.
The School of Music will bring audience members into a musical therapy session at “Love is a Plaintive Song,” an opera scenes show directed by the SOM’s new opera stage director Eric Gibson.
“Love is a Plaintive Song” — starring Sophie Longo, a fourth-year in vocal performance — will tell a new story of love and loss while including classic opera songs. The show will run Saturday at 8 p.m. and Sunday at 5 p.m. in the Timashev Recital Hall with music from Bernstein, Gilbert & Sullivan, Rodgers & Hammerstein, Mozart, Adamo, Sondheim, Bizet and Humperdinck.
Gibson said a typical scenes program includes a variety of opera music without a lot of cohesion from song to song. However, for this show, he intended to make it a story.
“I tried to find a theme. I was kind of inspired by what our new director [Michael Ibrahim] said when we had a faculty retreat before the students started,” Gibson said. “He just said, with students coming back in full force and in a post-pandemic world, we need to focus on mental health.”
To align with this idea, Gibson said he wrote the show as a therapy session where Longo recounts stories of relationships and heartbreak to her therapist, played by graduate student in music Jenna Hunnicutt.
“There are happy stories, there are sad stories, and it’s very up and down. It focuses on stories as if they’re in my head,” Longo said. “I like to think of it as in between each scene, she asks me a question and that answer is brought to life by the other singers coming on stage and acting out the scene.”
Longo said this way of performing opera scenes makes the audience more invested because of the storyline, rather than solely a collection of songs.
Gibson said “Love is a Plaintive Song” is his first directing job at Ohio State, but he began in the late ‘80s. Gibson joined the university at the beginning of the fall semester after teaching in Arizona and Texas.
The cast includes vocal, music, and performance majors, most learning acting skills and opera vocabulary from their enrollment in Gibson’s Opera Techniques class. However, Gibson said non-music majors were also encouraged to audition.
“We have music-ed people, and we have a lot of theater people. We weren’t starting from ground zero, but then you have to apply what they know to a scenes program,” Gibson said. “And we don’t discourage people who are not vocal majors. This show was open to anybody who wanted to audition.”
Because some of the music in “Love is a Plaintive Song” is in French, German and Italian, Longo said she had to learn how to sing in other languages while still portraying the meaning of the songs.
“It’s been a great experience, but there are difficulties. I would say one thing about my character, some of the stories hit close to home,” Longo said. “I’ve had my own experiences with love and loss, and so being able to tap into some of those past experiences has enhanced my performance.”
“Love in a Plaintive Song” will project subtitles on the monitor above the stage for audience members and is free to the public, Gibson said.
“I think this show is a great introductory experience for audience members that are looking to try out hearing an opera. I think, for a long time, opera was not very accessible, especially with some of it being in a foreign language,” Longo said. “This is an opportunity for audience members to be able to relate and appreciate music in a way that you wouldn’t necessarily be able to do in a fully staged long opera.”
