Top 10 Pandemic Pivot No. 9: Tulsa Opera Plays Ball with Rigoletto

Tobias Picker is one of the leading opera composers of his generation – his An American Tragedy premiered at the Metropolitan Opera in 2005 – and for the past four years he has been artistic director of Tulsa Opera. But for all his accomplishments, Picker never dreamed that one day he would be producing an opera in a baseball stadium.

Then came the pandemic and Tulsa Opera’s remarkable effort to find a way to perform Rigoletto for a live, in-person audience at the city’s downtown ONEOK Field.

“The first time in my life I ever set foot inside a baseball stadium I thought I’d gone to heaven,” Picker said. “It was a rehearsal for our baseball Rigoletto and Verdi was playing live on a green diamond.”

Rigoletto was supposed to open the 2020-21 season in October at the usual venue, the Tulsa Performing Arts Center, until the spread of the virus made it impossible. The day after the company announced its cancellation, in June,  CEO Ken McConnell got a call from a trustee of the stadium, asking if he might be interested in having the opera perform there, in a safe, outdoor setting. ONEOK Field, named for a natural gas utility, is home of the Tulsa Drillers minor-league baseball team.

“Everyone was rightly concerned and frightened about Covid, me included, but I thought we had to do something,” McConnell said. “So I threw the baseball idea to Tobias, and it turned into a big win for us. I think this Rigoletto was a key moment in Tulsa Opera’s history.” The company will celebrate its 75^th anniversary in the 2022-23 season.

At first, Picker was stumped, asking himself, “What am I going to do on a baseball field? But the more I thought about it, the more it seemed like it could work. The baseball diamond is a thing of beauty, and it’s the same size as the Metropolitan Opera stage. In fact, there’s a rich history of the Met touring to baseball fields in the early 20^th century, when they got 40,000 people out to hear Wagner in stadiums.”

Picker already had an outstanding cast lined up for the canceled PAC staging, and most of those singers were glad to work at a time when opera was shut down everywhere else. Only two of the original cast did not join the ballpark production, which featured Todd Thomas in the title role, Sarah Coburn as Gilda, Joshua Wheeker as the Duke of Mantua, and Morris Robinson as Sparafucille.

And then there was the adaptability of the piece itself. “There has been a Vegas Rat Pack Rigoletto, an Elvis Rigoletto, a Planet of the Apes version, a Mafia one, and so on,” Picker said. “Why not a baseball Rigoletto?”

He enlisted James Robinson, artistic director of the Opera Theater of St. Louis, to stage the production. The baseball adaptation fell into place neatly, with the Duke as the star pitcher for the Mantua City Dukes, Rigoletto as the team mascot, and Sparafucile as the umpire. To open the performance, the public address announcer called, “Play ball!”

Picker and Robinson cut the opera down to 90 minutes, with no intermission. They reduced the orchestration to piano, string quartet, and double bass, an ensemble that made sense from a virus-prevention standpoint by not having winds and brass.

 “We didn’t want to deal with having to socially distance musicians playing instruments that spray saliva,” Picker said. “Adding any more than the piano sextet would have been pushing the envelope of what we calculated to be the safest way to put on the show.”

Health and safety guidelines were of paramount importance, not least because a campaign rally held by President Trump inside a Tulsa arena in late June had caused a dramatic spike in cases in the city and county. “We wanted to show a much better example of behavior than the Trump rally,” said Erich Keil, director of production for the opera. He put together a team of epidemiologists and experts to follow AGMA’s stringent covid protocols for the 43 artists, staff, and crew involved.

Singers were allowed within six feet of each other if they were masked, while during scenes in which they sang unmasked they had to be 25 feet apart in the direction of vocal production and 10 feet apart in other directions. Positioned behind home plate, the string players, pianist, and conductor Steven White were separated by at least six-foot gaps.

The safety-first approach worked. “We had no positive tests of anyone involved with the production,” Keil said. “We had no instances of symptoms. And we had no reports that anybody got sick. It was a complete success.”

The baseball Rigoletto was a hit in its single performance on Oct. 9. Attendance was 1,826, with ticketholders spaced apart in the stadium. “Because the stadium has a capacity of about 7,800, under social distancing guidelines we could have sold up to 2,400 seats,” McConnell said. “That means we had about 75 percent utilization of available seats. Usually at the Performing Arts Center we might get 55 percent to 65 percent utilization. For Rigoletto, we had more people attending than we had at two performances of Carmen at the center last year.”

Opera at ONEOK Field was a cost-friendly event, with general admission tickets at $25. Also purchased for $3,000 apiece were 10 skyboxes, which seat 12 to 18 people in comfortable style. “Ticket sales were easy,” McConnell said. “Because it was at a baseball field, people who normally wouldn’t go to the opera were open to coming to it, plus we finished the night off with a fireworks show. More than 800 attendees had never been to an opera before.”

The production had a budget of $265,000, about half the cost of mounting an opera at the Tulsa PAC, which would have added the expense of a full orchestra plus a higher rent than the stadium charged. The outdoor Rigoletto did require a top-flight sound system for amplification, at a cost of $50,000, and the whole event was captured on professional video, directed by Frank Zamacona, now available on YouTube and the company’s website (and below).

With the 2019-20 season cut short by the pandemic, its $3.2 million budget had a surplus of $650,000, because of reduced production costs and income from federal CARES Act PPP loans and grants. With the pandemic continuing to limit production, the current season’s budget is down to $2.2 million.

Picker is looking forward to the next baseball opera at ONEOK Field, set to open the 2021-22 season in October. It has yet to be announced, but seems likely to have crossover appeal. “I think Pagliacci would work,” he said. “I would love to do West Side Story. Oklahoma! is not out of the question. I’ve thought about Damn Yankees.”

Photos from the top: Todd Thomas in the title role (team mascot of The Dukes), Joshua Wheeker as the Duke of Mantua