For a Song

Altman marries movie and music in Lyric’s “Wedding”

By Paul Engleman
Special to the Chicago Tribune

December 5, 2004

The story goes that during a frustrating day on a movie set in the mid-'70s, director Robert Altman, asked what his next project would be, blurted in disgust, "A wedding!" By the end of the day, Altman's exasperation became the inspiration -- and the title -- for his next movie.

"Yes, that's true," Altman says. "It was on 'Three Women.' This reporter from Mother Jones magazine came twirling onto the set, it was 120 degrees. I was being a smartass with her, saying we'd be looking for work as wedding photographers. Then we broke for lunch, and I said, 'You know, that's a pretty good idea.' And it did become our next project."

More than 25 years later, Altman's sprawling comedic pageant that relates the unlikely commingling of an old-money family from Lake Forest with an Italian trucking clan from Louisville is coming to Lyric Opera. The production, which will have its world premiere next Saturday, is the brainchild of Pulitzer Prize-winning composer William Bolcom, who has been looking to reprise the collaboration with Altman and lyricist Arnold Weinstein that clicked for "McTeague," an adaptation of a Frank Norris novel that won acclaim in its world premiere at the Lyric in 1992.

The concept for the operatic version of "A Wedding" was a little longer in development than the movie. "I must've bugged Bob about it for five years," says Bolcom, whom Altman calls "the main constituent" of the creative triumvirate.

"I didn't keep count, but it's been a while," Altman says, his tone bordering on weary as he begins to recite the obstacles that stand in the way of a project, then pauses to summarize in one word: "lawyers."

In the 12 years since "McTeague," Altman has found, the challenge of directing singing actors has become less difficult, as acting has come to be a more accepted and integrated part of opera. He says there is little difference between directing an opera and directing a film, except that in opera, "the separation from reality is greater," and a film usually has more actors.

"I don't know much about opera. I don't particularly like opera -- at least I'm not an aficionado. I certainly can't tell if the performers are singing on key or off-key and whether they've missed a note. I'm much more interested in the stagecraft. To me this is theater, and theater is the same as film. It's putting on a show. This production is less opera than musical comedy. This could easily play on Broadway."

Over the years, Altman has proven to be an unpredictable artist, moving from broad canvases to tight crevices. Shortly after he directed the rambling epic "Nashville," for example, he moved on to the almost claustrophobic "Streamers," which was set inside an army barracks. But there is one predictable thing about an Altman project: Top performers want to come work with him.

"If they don't have a better job, they do," he snickers. "Of course I find that very flattering, very gratifying. It verifies my philosophy that it's the performers who create the work. I don't do it. I just mirror what they do. People may make more of it, but it's that simple, really."

Says Bolcom: "Bob creates a climate in which everyone feels emboldened."

Jake Gardner, who plays the doctor turned art dealer Jules, says Altman "allows everyone to bring what they can to a scene. This is definitely not about `where do I stand?'" The one instruction that Altman stresses, he says, is "underplay, don't overplay."

Altman explains: "Opera singers usually are trained to overplay. With most of them, their general orientation is to make sure that the audience gets everything. My feeling is that the audience has to be put on notice immediately that they better pay attention or they may miss something."

Underplaying is a style that Altman brings to his own role. "I'm a mirror, I reflect. I don't have to speak to have an impact. The less input I have, the better. The performers can look at me and know how they're doing. I can't lie to them, even though I might try. They'll make their own adjustments. They police themselves. I don't have to say anything. They know how to fit themselves into the mix. Really, all I do is turn the light switch on in the morning, say let's go, and turn it off at night."

During a mid-November rehearsal, Altman is silent throughout the first hour while actor-singers Jerry Hadley and David Cangelosi go through their musical readings with Bolcom and conductor Dennis Russell Davies. Altman appears impassive, except that his gaze is fixed on the singers. As the rehearsal moves on to acting out a scene, he becomes more involved, but he does not make comments to the performers unless they ask him a question. After a scene is played out with an assemblage of actors in the foreground, the first place Altman goes is the back of the stage to consult on an issue of timing with two performers descending a staircase.

"Many of the things that I'm doing are on the secondary and tertiary level," he says. "Sixty-five percent of the people watching will not notice them on the staircase. It's not something to focus on. But it builds the whole fabric."

The only time Altman appears to be the person in charge comes at a restless moment, just prior to the final run-through before lunch, when he says, "All right, people, let's boogie here."

If the willingness to let a rehearsal simply unfold is essential to Altman's method, Bolcom has a flexibility that meshes perfectly with that style. To accommodate the timing of the action that needs to take place, the composer pencils in additional musical measures to his score on demand. "That's not a problem at all, it's actually lots of fun," he says. "You can't look at your work as sacrosanct."

In adapting the film to opera, Bolcom reduced the characters from 48 to 16. But he says that "A Wedding" will still include the Altman trademark multilayering of dialogue that jarred movie audiences in a welcome way in "M*A*S*H" in 1970. The set, designed by Robin Wagner, also will include visual layering, so that background scenes take place behind gauze curtains.

Altman points out that the dialogue in the film version of "A Wedding" was mostly improvised, so that the libretto for the opera, though credited to Arnold Weinstein and him, was really written by the cast of the film.

Having spent considerable time here last year directing "The Company," his picture window into the Joffrey Ballet, and now returning for more than a month to direct "A Wedding," Altman says he likes Chicago. But it's not the city that draws him here, it's the work.

"Working is what I have the most fun doing," he says. "I don't know what I would have done if I had retired at 55 or 60 or whatever the retirement age is. But I would have been dead years and years ago."

With his 80th birthday looming in February, Altman shows no signs of backing off his prolific pace. Despite falling out of favor with the Hollywood establishment and its funding source long ago, Altman has directed pictures at a rate of one a year since his first full-length feature, "Countdown," a 1968 astronaut film that predated "The Right Stuff" by five years and helped relaunch the career of Robert Duvall. There have been some 35 feature films in all, and Altman, in a small room in the Civic Opera House, seems capable of talking about each one in detail as he works his way through a sub sandwich. But he is more interested in focusing on the project at hand.

"The most accurate analogy for the process of producing a show is childbirth," Altman says. "That means pain and joy and love." Three weeks into rehearsals for "A Wedding," and with only three weeks left until the show opens, he is feeling the pain of a rehearsal schedule that is "not nearly long enough." The night before, he was up late, concerned about working through a complex scene that involved nearly a dozen performers moving about the stage. But during the morning's rehearsal, the scene was enacted piece by piece, with each run-through lasting a bit longer, until one full, smooth full-run-through before the lunch break.

"I did not think we were going to be able to complete that scene this morning," he says. "But I'm always surprised when something works."

As with a pregnancy, "You might think that a baby would be better if it had 12 months to develop instead of nine. But nine is what you've got to work with. And usually all the fingers and toes are going to be there. Right now I feel there will be many things that will be lost. But I'm wrong, because it won't be lost. And if something is lost, it won't be missed."

Before the curtain goes down on "A Wedding," Altman expects to be at work on another movie project, this one with Garrison Keillor, the novelist and creator of the public radio show "A Prairie Home Companion." In the film, Keillor will play himself, and the story will take place during the show.

"Garrison Keillor is a true genius," says Altman, whose name also has been associated with that word over the years. "He is in a constant state of writing." He also is regarded as a master of understatement, which, combined with Altman's method of underplaying, will likely result in some low-voltage, under-the-radar nuance and humor.

After rehearsing a scene in which the groom's uncle is caught trying to abscond with the wedding gifts, Jerry Hadley turns to the director and asks, "Should I push him down and kick him?"

Altman shrugs. "Whatever works."

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