Friday, October 20, 2000

Seaside theater touch of 'Class'

By LAURA STEWART
NEWS-JOURNAL FINE ARTS WRITER

DAYTONA BEACH — When Wendy Lehr sits down at her dressing-room mirror before tonight's opening of Seaside Music Theater's "Master Class," she'll do more than mimic the vivid beauty of Maria Callas, La Divina."

She'll also take on the larger-than-life persona of the opera legend, whose turbulent life and passionate art inspired Terrence McNally's 1996 Tony Award-winning play. The touches Lehr will add in her dressing room the svelte pantsuit, high heels, dramatic makeup and shoulder-length dark wig will only reflect a deeper, more subtle transformation.

I never thought I'd play Maria Callas in 'Master Class,'" said the Minnesota-based actress/director, whose most recent Seaside role was the frowsy Miss Havisham in "Great Expectations."

"For one thing, I don't look like Maria Callas. But when Lester Malizia, the play's director called and first asked me, two years ago, I jumped at the chance to do it," Lehr said. "At that time, though, I wasn't available to do it and Seaside put off scheduling the play until now.

"I'm glad we waited I'm so glad I've had this amount of time to research her. She's so well known that there is a lot to research I'm just reading a new biography, Maria Callas: Sacred Monster,' and it's full of pictures."

Lehr looked at the thick volume recently while on a lunch break from a "Master Class" rehearsal, and flipped randomly from one picture to the next. Here was Callas as a plump Brunhilde in Wagner's "Walkure," in Venice in 1949, and here she was at her La Scala debut, as Aida in 1950.

When she met Toscanini, in a September 1950 audition, he was stunned by her resonant soprano and said, "I've never conducted Macbeth' because I've never found the right singer to be a right Lady Macbeth. She is the singer I need. I'll do Macbeth' with her at La Scala."

And, on another page of the book, was Maria Callas as the slender Audrey Hepburn type she became in 1954. The transformation into the sort of slender beauty who truly resembled a mythical Medea meant losing 60 pounds. It resulted in critics' charges that Callas' voluminous voice suffered, but it also made her spectacular ability to both sing and act her roles even more effective, said Lehr.

Becoming Callas in McNally's powerful portrayal, which casts a diva past her prime against three talented young singers in a 1972 master class at the Juilliard School, meant imagining the facts of her life.

Born to Greek parents in New York in 1923, she was taken to Athens in 1937 after those parents divorced. Her voice, already recognized as extraordinary, won her a place at the National Conservatory. Callas studied with Elvira Hidalgo, the Spanish singer who nurtured her talent, and, within a few years, returned to New York.

Callas' was a troubled life, said Lehr. She didn't get along with her mother during her mother's brief life, which ended in 1977; she had difficulties breaking into opera at levels appropriate for her huge voice and vibrant style of acting. In 1947, she allowed herself to be taken under the wing of the Italian businessman she married in 1949.

"Meneghini was much older on the upper side of 20 years," she said. "But he was a successful businessman and loved her. He protected her and helped her advance. She devoted so many of her early years, in the late '40s and '50s, to being Meneghini's wife that as she became a hit and more of the world,' she needed to break away."

During the mid '50s, slim and beautiful, Callas became more than the "world's greatest soprano," she was a phenomenon. Designers created clothes just for her, and she amassed an immense wardrobe: 25 furs; 130 pairs of shoes; 200 suits; 50 evening gowns; 300 hats.

By the late '50s, when she met Greek tycoon Aristotle Onassis and left her husband for him, the pressures on Callas were colossal, said Lehr. The press hounded her, critics failed to praise performances appropriately and the public expecting every aria to be sublime began to intimidate the singer.

She became known as temperamental, a diva who truly was "La Divina" but also was considered a prima donna in the worst, most self-indulgent, spoiled sense. That's not the Callas she will become in "Master Class," said Lehr. When the diva meets her three students in the play, it's to share her remarkable talent and experience and to push them to greater heights, to encourage them to become artists too.

"She was devoted when it came to her master classes. Maria Callas was diligent about her own preparation and she expected that her students would be too," said Lehr. "She set a great example. I've read books, listened to recordings and tapes of her master classes and interviews. I've watched documentaries, and I'm absorbed by her.

"I've had to allow myself to have this kind of personal relationship with her. I'm a very intuitive actor, and I work from a deep sense of creativity the feeling, the visceral response to the character.

"I've always been ... not humble, exactly, but very available as an artist," said Lehr, looking for a moment perplexed. Then she sat up straighter at the lunch table and looked more than confident almost arrogant, like a diva, and she spoke in Callas' beautiful soprano, with resonant cadences. "Now, the minute I step on stage, I have to be Maria Callas. I like imagining how she must have felt in those master classes, and I know that there's a real person there."

If you go

What: Seaside Music Theater's "Master Class."

When: Today through Nov. 5.

Where: SMT Downtown, 176 N. Beach St., Daytona Beach.

Tickets: $22-20.

Information: (904) 255-3146, 252-6200 or 1 (800) 854-5592 or www.seasidemusictheater.org.