This past Monday, we announced the full casting line-up for our golden anniversary. Thanks to all of you, we had our most successful single-ticket day at the box office in years! We’re so happy you’re as excited about this summer as we are. If you haven’t grabbed your tickets yet, I strongly advise you to do so soon. I look on our finished roster with real pride and anticipation – there are so many artists I cannot wait for you to see perform this season. Still, casting a season takes many months of work and discussion, and I thought you might enjoy a little window into that process.

Where to begin? Like The Sound of Music tells us, we really do “start at the very beginning” – our company mission statement. The statement tells us that Glimmerglass “provides professional training and performance opportunities for emerging artists,” “engages acclaimed artists who inspire the highest standards of achievement,” and “collaborates with regional organizations, schools, and businesses to enhance life in Central NY.” This stiff language encapsulates the real magic of Glimmerglass: its firm roots in this community coupled with its international reach and reputation. 

community is key

Our community is the “special sauce” in all our productions. Think of them all:

• Talented local choristers, like the ones we saw in Pagliacci last season and will see again in Tosca
• Adult, children, and sometimes even animal actors and supernumeraries
• Our fabulous children’s chorus, who come from miles around our campus and are featured in their own youth opera as well as our core productions
• Amazing dancers and musical theater performers from our collaborations with Ithaca College and Syracuse University

  

• Brilliant instrumentalists from around the region who make up the Glimmerglass Festival Orchestra

Taking on many of our chorus and supernumerary roles throughout the season, the passion, energy, and diverse array of talents these groups represent radiates off our stage in every performance. And YOU can be one of them! Youth and local chorus auditions for this season take place March 15 & 16 at our rehearsal hall in Warren: https://glimmerglass.org/auditions

crafting a season

Alongside our commitment to community, we also strive to bring world-class performances and international talent to the Festival each season, not only through special events — like the Broadway legend Bernadette Peters’ appearance this summer (grab your tickets now before they sell out!) — but through working with some of the world’s greatest singers. To do this, we acknowledge that some roles in our productions demand years of experience and training to perform at the highest level (remember that singing opera is often an Olympian feat of endurance!) and that some characters in our stories are older. We designate these as “Guest Artist” roles.

Our “Guest Artist” roster usually begins with our Artist-in-Residence — generous souls of great experience and renown who are willing to mentor our young artists while undertaking one of the central roles in our season. This is usually worked out through a personal relationship with the Artistic & General Director — I have worked with Greer Grimsley and Luretta Bybee (pictured to the left) on a number of projects throughout our careers, and aside from being phenomenal performers and colleagues, I know they will have so much to offer our talented Young Artists. Greer may have one of the most unique (and loudest!) voices I have ever encountered. He is one of the few singers I know who often marks things down TWO octaves — because he can. You can witness the results of Greer and Luretta’s work with our Young Artists this season on August 14th.

The rest of our Guest Artist roster is filled through a mystical process no one really understands called ‘artistic direction’ (if anyone has any pointers, I’m always ready to listen!). It is an incredibly complex juggling act that tries to balance an infinite number of sometimes contradictory factors — and you’ll need to ply me with a good Barolo to coerce my personal secrets out of me. Suffice to say that it starts with a deep knowledge of the repertoire involved, moves on to countless hours of auditions, recommendations, research, listening, and collaborative discussion, and is followed by lengthy negotiations with agents and managers around the world. It can take many months to cast a season successfully — and I’m so grateful to our Director of Artistic Administration Lauren Bailey, our beloved Maestro Joseph Colaneri, and the many other advisors and colleagues who help guide these decisions. 

the team behind the talent

At Glimmerglass, we try to provide a safe space and a supportive environment for singers to debut a significant role for the first time, often before they take it somewhere like the Met, San Francisco, or Chicago. We also love bringing back artists who began their careers here as Young Artists, and employing professional singers from the Central NY region. All the rest of our Guest Artists this season fit into these categories.

This year was a new experience for us as a company, as we worked for the first time with a Broadway casting agent to cast the two demanding leading roles in Sunday in the Park with George. I spent a memorable day in NYC with our director Ethan Heard, hearing ranks of amazing artists who often moved me to tears in under 32 bars. One of our goals here was to ensure all the different voices of that ensemble — some operatically trained, others coming from the world of musical theater — would blend into a powerful and convincing whole. John Riddle and Marina Pires, pictured below left, are set to take the stage as the leads in Sunday in the Park with George. John Riddle originated the role of Prince Hans in Disney’s Frozen on Broadway and Marina Pires was much acclaimed for her performance as Gloria Estefan in the national tour of On Your Feet! These two very special artists will bring so much of themselves to these roles. 

Our next mandate is to give amazing opportunities to the next generation of great artists — something we do as well as anywhere else in the country through our phenomenal Young Artists Program. They will make up the remainder of our ensemble positions. Still, we work very hard to ensure they are also given more featured opportunities through named roles and substantial cover assignments. This annual audition process takes many weeks and is one of the most ‘sacred’ parts of our work. Our program and others like it are crucial career stepping-stones for those lucky enough to secure a summer position, and competition is fierce. From well over 1000 applicants, most of whom already have one or more degrees in vocal performance, we will choose around 40 singers each season. 

This is the most complex part of the casting conundrum. Our Production Stage Manager Dustin West, Director of Artistic Administration Lauren Bailey, Young Artists Program Director Andrea Grant, and Head of Stage Movement and Choreography Eric Sean Fogel spend an eye-watering amount of time designing “The Grid”— a logistical map of how the many separate assignments in our season will be sorted into “tracks,” or a series of similar assignments belonging to one individual artist. But this is only a first guess — once the tour is complete, these tracks must be adjusted many times over before they are adequately tailored to the individual artists we have heard around the country. 

And that’s all there is to it! It looks so simple on the page that it can be hard to grasp the enormous group effort behind it. The beauty of it is that it’s all a bit of a gamble, and you can never fully predict how all these brilliant individuals will spark off each other when they finally come together in rehearsal. When it all clicks, though…that’s when the magic happens; and although I don’t know precisely how or where it will appear, I’m quietly confident there will be plenty of it to go around this summer!