Opera fans are enjoying a richly creative spring here in Chicago. Madama Butterfly, led by gay director Matthew Ozawa, is currently melding virtual reality and pop fantasy for a unique take on the form at the highly revered Lyric Opera. Meanwhile, the adventurous Thompson Street Opera Company (TSOC) is blending the singular styles of drag, film noir and opera into one delicious extravaganza called Off-Nights at the Sometime Café. TSOC, incidentally, is devoted to providing an expressive environment for the LGBTQ+ experience.
TSOC’s Artistic Director Claire DiVizio spoke with Windy City Times about the company’s history and the amazingly diverse artistry that their current offering is providing for the community.
Windy City Times: Hi, Claire! Embarrassingly, I’ve never heard of Thompson Street Opera Company before. But I am so excited that you exist. Can you give us a shorthand account on how the company came about?
Claire DiVizio: TSOC was founded, back when I and my colleagues were young(er) artists in college and grad school, as a way to create opportunities for both emerging singers and composers.
On the performer side, I was frustrated with the expectation put on singers that if we’re “serious about our careers,” we should be participating in summer festivals, most of which are predator-ally expensive. As for composers, it became clear to me as I went through school, that most of the works we were performing were by people who have been dead for a very, very long time, despite the fact that there are still many composers alive today writing operas.
From 2013-2016, the company ran as a summer festival in Louisville, Kentucky, which has a big contemporary theater scene, but…there was much less of an appetite for new opera there and we hit a ceiling in terms of our attendance and interest… Many of the artists we hired ended up being from the Chicago area. They all kept telling me that I and the company should move to Chicago, and so we did… Being in Chicago also fundamentally changed the way that we viewed our purpose—we’re part of a large community of artists who are participating in shows, not just as a paycheck or a stepping stone to “bigger and better things,” but as an end in itself… We’ve found our particular niche, within a niche industry, in creating a space where LGBTQIA+ artists are able to express themselves in ways that the extremely gender-normative opera industry doesn’t really have space for and sometimes actively discourages.
WCT:What can you tell us about Dave Walther and Off-Nights at the Sometime Café?
CD: Something that is very different about us as compared with other opera companies is that we choose all our repertoire through an annual open call. Every year, we receive between 50 and 200 new works and from that pool, we choose a season.
Off-Nights stood out for being both really charming and genuinely hilarious… But more than that, it really reflects Dave’s lived experience as a queer elder in the arts world—ze is a multi-hyphenate artist/musician/creator/performer who has a lifetime track record of using zis work to tell queer stories in ways that center joy, laughter, and love. Off-Nights at the Sometimes Café feels like a crystallization of that ethos—it’s a great blend of quirky, clever, goofy, and heartfelt, has memorable tunes, and is a great showpiece for all the performers.
WCT: The premise of operatic voices mixing with drag performers is exciting. What can audiences expect from this blend onstage?
CD: Something that stood out about this piece during the review process was that it gave us an opportunity to collaborate with drag artists in a way that’s organic and integrated, the drag artists are playing characters in the show’s story, and so they get to dance and show off for us… Drag and opera actually have a ton in common—they’re both niche art forms with fanatical devotees. They’re both often viewed by mainstream society as extreme or strange. They also both take WAY more skill, training, and work than most people believe.
As a fun fact, one of our drag kings (Beck Buechel, stage name Mx. O’Lydian) is also a trained opera singer. There will be a total of three big drag dance numbers in the show, and while, for safety, we won’t be encouraging people to toss cash onstage…we will have both a physical tip jar and a QR code for digital tips! Tip your queens and kings!
WCT:I am a huge film noir fan. Are they any particular elements of the genre or familiar plotlines that crop up here?
CD: The biggest parallel to the genre is the framing device of the Narrator—the plot consists entirely of flashbacks to a particular week in the Narrator’s memory…. Unlike a noir mystery, there’s no murder involved. Instead, the Narrator has decided to tell the story as a “sex mystery,” as he attempts to puzzle out the motives of everyone in the tangled social web of the cafe… There are also a few moments that take tropes of the genre and turn them on their head. For instance, instead of the classic “shocking secret identity” reveal in the penultimate scene, a character’s attempt at exposing someone’s true identity just ends up revealing her own problems.
WCT:What do you hope audiences take away from this show?
CD: The way I described the show in the press release was “poignantly unserious,” and I think that’s the kind of art that I feel like we all need right now…It’s a story about a bunch of misfits finding their chosen family, and all the ridiculous, touching, absurd and sweet moments that are born from that… All the characters in this show are unmarried, childless, queer, and finding their place in the world at a variety of ages, and in a weird way I think that working on this show has helped me process, accept, and even celebrate where I am in life. Yes, queer and trans people often end up pushed to the margins of society. Yet because of that, we are able to create these beautiful, vibrant, colorful communities and relationships that fulfill our needs and desires in unique and unexpected ways, even if they don’t conform to the normative ideals of “adulthood” and family.
This is a truly intergenerational cast, with almost a fifty-year age difference between the youngest and oldest cast members, and it’s been incredibly grounding for all of us to work with Kingsley Day (playing the Narrator and pianist), who has been doing this since before most of us were born, and is still filled with the joyful optimism and good humor that keep queer and artistic communities thriving. Also… this show is just really fucking funny. I am laughing out loud in every rehearsal and… Kingsley Day is absolutely killing it, doing double duty as both Narrator and pianist. The whole show is just over an hour, so people will still have time to get out and enjoy the nightlife of Andersonville afterwards, should they so desire!
(Note: This interview was edited for clarity and length.)
Off-Nights at the Sometimes Café runs March 19th – 22nd at Bramble Arts Loft, 5545 N. Clark Street, Further information is available at www.thompsonstreetopera.org.