Hughes Goes From Countess to Baroness This Summer

Die Fledermaus in rehearsal (L-R): Daniel Webb, Lance Hedlund, Rosemary Hollingsworth, Eric Shaw, and Karen Hughes.

Karen Hughes, Pickford, lives a fairly ordinary life most of the year, but the STARS resident soprano and harpist does find opportunities to travel to distant places and share her wonderful voice internationally. This past winter one of her grad school opera directors let her know that auditions were being held for Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro for performances in Italy. She traveled to Lincoln, Nebraska where one of the 10 U.S. auditions were held and, in April, learned that she had earned the role of the Countess.

Karen had just completed the production of the Soo Theatre’s A Grand Night For Singing when she took off to a small mountain town outside of Rimini on Italy’s eastern coast, called Novafeltria. The 200-seat opera house called a teatro sociale with three round balconies and seating on the main floor is also used for community theatre, public meetings, and music concerts.

Another performance was in Bellaria, a tourist town on the Adriatic Ocean. Hughes said the company arrived with their sets and costumes and walked through the sand and sunbathers to the stage. The sun worshippers made their way to a lovely outdoor dinner theatre performance literally on the oceanside.

Hughes left for Novafeltria thinking she knew only the director. She actually renewed acquaintances with a former apprentice director she knew at Des Moines Metro Opera in 2003, a voice teacher with whom she had shared a masters class, another voice teacher from Minnesota, a Nebraska graduate she’d seen perform at her alma mater DePauw, and three of the singers in the chorus who are currently attending DePauw. It was exciting to find many persons that she had just met there all had close friends in common.

“The music world really has its own little network,” Hughes said. “You often get the next job from the last one.”

Hughes admits opera is more popular in Italy than in the United States. “Most people know the stories and the history even if they do not attend the performances,” she remarked. Hughes struck up a conversation with her gondolier driver on a day trip to Venice. He talked about Mozart and drove her party past the home of Casanova who had been a good friend of Mozart’s number one librettist, the person who writes the story for the music.

She said that, just as she is trying to expose young people from the Eastern Upper Peninsula to the opera art form, the Italians are just as excited about getting young people from their town into the opera house. Hughes said she chose Hansel and Gretel for the first opera at the Soo Theatre because it is a story that everyone knows. The Magic Flute was next--a fairy tale with princes and princesses and a magical story of courage and honor.

This year’s production of Die Fledermaus will appeal to all ages, as it is a comic operetta by Strauss. It will be sung in English and is basically the German form of the American musical. Also known as The Revenge of the Bat, it is the story of Baron von Eisenstein playing a bad joke on a friend who plans to get back at him. The plot has a number of comical twists; and the cast is made up of many of Hughes's old friends and some new ones, along with local favorites like Anna Wilson, Rich Morrison, Mark San Angelo, Chris Friese, Trisha Wells, and a number of STARS students and other area performers.

Eric Shaw, who grew up in Sault, Ontario, plays Herr Eisenstein and Hughes is his wife Rosalinda. Rosemary Hollingsworth, who was so wonderful in A Grand Night For Singing, is in the cast. Other guest singers have come from Knoxville and Omaha.

This will be a chance to hear the lilting music of Strauss sung by marvelous voices and played by a talented orchestra. It is also a chance to laugh a lot as the story and song weave their magic. Tickets are available at the Soo Theatre, 534 Ashmun, 906-632-1930 for performances Thursday, September 11 and Saturday, September 13 at 7:30 p.m. and a Sunday matinée at 2:30 p.m. on September 14. Go online to the Soo Theatre website at sootheatre.org to learn more.

Here's another article about Die Fledermaus with links to photos.