Bejun Mehta Stars in Haymarket Opera's Orlando

CHICAGO—Artistically, Haymarket Opera Company is firmly planted in the Baroque era. For the past decade, the company has been charming Chicago opera lovers with zesty, elegant performances of works by the likes of Handel, Telemann, Charpentier, and Cavalli. Haymarket’s gifted singers and musicians explore every emotional nuance of period style. Most sets are exquisitely painted flats, sliding in and out of the wings as if the company’s assorted Chicago stages were an 18^th century king’s jewel-box theater. In seductive little dance sequences, when a comely lady lifts her billowing skirts to reveal a well-turned ankle, our hearts race like that of the handsome swain she loves.

Pandemics carry frightening echoes of eras far older than the Baroque. But once the Covid-19 pandemic hit in mid-March 2020, Haymarket Opera responded with a distinctly 21^st -century solution. Losing the final performances of 2019-20, Monteverdi’s L’Incoronazione di Poppea in June 2020, was a hard blow. But the company’s tenth-anniversary season, 2020-21, would still be something special. Haymarket decided to go entirely virtual. The offerings would be three Handel operas, two of them filmed in HD at one of Chicago’s leading film studios.

Haymarket released Acis and Galatea last October and Apollo e Dafne in March. Its final 2020-21 production, Orlando starring countertenor Bejun Mehta, will be released in three installments beginning Sept. 16. Each act will be streamed in succession—Sept. 16, 23 and 30, and the entire set will be available through Oct. 31. Also in the cast are Kimberly Jones, Emily Fons, Erica Schuller, and David Govertsen.

With so many opera companies and orchestras returning to live performance this month, Haymarket’s filmed Orlando may seem out of step. But prudent management is one reason Haymarket has managed to thrive.  A small organization making art for an admittedly niche audience, it could easily have been swamped by the pandemic’s constantly changing restrictions.

A realist speaks out

“I don’t think hope is a strategy,” said Chase Hopkins, Haymarket’s general director. “As a company, we interact with a shifting landscape. We don’t know how it’s going to play out. I can’t jeopardize my artists. We don’t have a large patron services department to handle ticket cancelation or exchanges.”

In April 2020, Haymarket’s board decided not to gamble on a pandemic-free future. The entire 2020-21 anniversary season would be filmed, observing whatever Covid-19 protocols might be required at the time.

Craig Trompeter, a viola da gambist and Haymarket Opera’s founder and artistic director, puts it bluntly.

“We didn’t want to celebrate our tenth anniversary by having no season. We decided to commit to a full year on film so that we could plan.”

With their small casts, Acis and Galatea and Apollo e Dafne were filmed as concert operas in Chicago’s Resolution Studios. Orlando, however, is fully staged and was filmed this past June in an actual theater. Sarah Edgar was the staging coach, and costumes are by Stephanie Cluggish. The action unfolds before darkly brooding scenery by Zuleyka V. Benitez, which is projected behind the singers. It was filmed in Jarvis Opera Hall, a new venue at DePaul University on Chicago’s North Side. Once a chapel and more recently a concert hall for DePaul’s School of Music, the building is now a 162-seat, state-of-the-art opera house. The film’s director is Garry Grasinski, a Grammy-nominated Chicago producer/director who has filmed archival and promotional video for Haymarket since its inception.

Mehta is an international opera star, and Orlando, which he has filmed before, has become something of a signature role. His days of performing with small companies like Haymarket are long behind him. But Hopkins, a former singer, knew Mehta and broached the question.

One bright side of the pandemic

“Haymarket was not on my radar,” Mehta admitted. “My number one thing is quality, but I knew quite a number of people who play with the company. I knew Craig’s work already, and Jory Vinikour (the acclaimed harpsichordist who performs often with Haymarket) and I are colleagues. My calendar had just been decimated, and here was this scrappy company somehow managing to make work. I was very impressed by that. When nothing is happening, and here’s a place that’s not only doing something, but doing good something, it makes you want to grab on with both hands.”

During the pandemic Mehta did some solo recitals. Usually recorded by invisible cameras in theaters with no audiences, the experience was, he recalled, “hideous.” Orlando in Chicago provided a welcome change, finally being on stage with other singers, the orchestra a few feet away and camera, audio, and production crews close at hand.  And since Haymarket’s budget was tight, one act was filmed per day, over three consecutive days. Only one retake was allowed per number. That pressure to get it right the first time, said Mehta, made filming Orlando feel like an adrenalin-fueled live performance.  

Adrenalin flowed for another reason. Just before filming started, the City of Chicago loosened its restrictions on indoor activity. Masks and social distancing were no longer required. Suddenly performers were free to move around, to face and touch each other as they sang.

“It was kind of intense,” said Grasinski. “We had planned out the scenes. We had marked off stage space with boxes. I had storyboarded the entire opera. And then the Covid precautions just seemed to melt away. But it was magical in a way. We all just worked things out scene by scene.”

Mehta reveled in the unexpected freedom. “By the time the cameras actually started to roll,” he said, “the original plans had more or less gone out the window. If you were singing a duet, you could actually have your colleague in your arms. We had to do a lot of it on the fly, which was thrilling, actually. Especially within the arias, we had enormous freedom. For me personally, it was like playing in a sandbox. I enjoyed it very much.”

Filming Orlando’s mad scene was a high point for Grasinski.

“I wanted to break the format we were filming in,” he said, “and go one-on-one with Bejun. He’s such an electric performer. We would literally improvise a kind of dance. I would move around him, and he would react to me moving. It was one of the highlights of my long career.”

Haymarket will announce its 2021-22 season shortly. There will definitely be live stagings, said Hopkins, but perhaps also an online element. Like most groups, the company’s virtual performances reached viewers far beyond its usual audience, and Haymarket wants to retain that connection. Productions will most likely be in the Jarvis Opera Hall. In recent years Haymarket had been using larger theaters not especially suited to its intimate, period-style staging. With luck, it will now offer more performances of each opera to compensate for Jarvis’s smaller seating capacity.

What will not change, said Trompeter, is Haymarket’s emphasis on period Baroque sound and stagecraft.

“When I started out, I studied viola da gamba, so I’m not a practical person,” he joked. “But I think it’s important to do what you love. I always make the ‘Downton Abbey’ comparison. It’s not difficult for people to put themselves in another person’s shoes.”

Pictured from the top: Bejun Mehta as Orlando, Erica Schuller as Dorinda, Emily Fons and Kim Jones as Mendoro and Angelica