Maybe it’s on purpose, but at the moment she’s sort of a plain Jane. In his clutches, so to speak is a reserved young woman named Melinda Brown, who normally spends her time squirreled away in the stockroom. An imposing woman with an accent from across the pond, she announces that our coterie of visiting writers and photographers are going to find out how “designers get their inspiration, and how the fashion of today intermingles with period costumes of 100 years ago.” Intermittently, we’ll be stopping in on Wigmaster Darren Jinks. Jenny Green is LA Opera’s Costume Director and she’s been with the company for 11 years. “Not all makeovers are glamorous,” Jenny Green tells us. The feeling one has is that of stumbling across buried or hidden treasure. In the front of the building there’s sewing and designing and lots of collaborative work going on, but push through the doors at the back and the rear of the building contains double-tiered racks with hundreds, maybe thousands, of opera production costumes. The LA Opera Costume Shop is actually a 31,000 square foot warehouse on Alameda Street in downtown Los Angeles.
So it’s not just opera month, as Kwon says, but a time for new discoveries.
Kathy Kwon, an independent publicist and sometime liaison with LA Opera, pointed out the other day that May is “opera month.” And while I’m thinking that this could simply be a savvy marketing tool, it’s also true that Los Angeles is showcasing several productions: Gershwin’s “Porgy and Bess” at the Ahmanson is an American classic, but the others – Long Beach Opera’s “An American Soldier’s Tale” (Stravinsky’s music, Vonnegut’s libretto) with “A Fiddler’s Tale” by Wynton Marsalis, plus LA Opera’s first-time stabs at “Thaïs” (Massenet) and “A Streetcar Named Desire” (Previn) – are little known by most of us or not known at all.
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