Since May, Opera Grand Rapids has continued to gain momentum in the transition and expansion of our Leadership and Governing teams. Long-time patron and Opera Grand Rapids Board of Trustees member, Win S. Irwin, has generously stepped down from his position on the Board to become the Opera’s full time Interim Executive Director. Win will serve in this crucial capacity during the Executive Search Committee’s National search for a new leader for the organization. Win is working to prepare the organization for the its up-coming 2018-19 Season and solidify major systems, plans, and processes.
The Executive Search Committee for Opera Grand Rapids’ new Executive Director was formed in June 2018 and has been meeting regularly to discuss the steps and progress of the on-going national search. The committee is made-up of local community leaders, major OGR supporters and investors, and other associated parties. The Search Committee’s aim is to begin interviewing candidates over the next 60 days with the goal to appoint the new Executive Director by October/November 2018.
Over the past 6 months, the Opera Grand Rapids Board of Trustees has gained 4 new, outstanding members: Mr. Peter Hahn – CEO of Metro Health – University of Michigan Health; Cassandra Hayes – Executive Communications and Corporate Affairs of Amway; Madelaine Lane – Partner at Warner, Norcross, & Judd; Thomas Bandyk – Community Volunteer. We are thrilled to have each of these valued community members join our Governing team and we look forward to the progressive and exciting work we will accomplish together for opera here in West Michigan.
As each of our Leadership teams expands and advances, Opera Grand Rapids will continue to work towards its founding mission to provide high quality live opera to the West Michigan community.
Artists from Opera Grand Rapids andWest Michigan Opera Project performed a variety of music including opera, Spanish Zarzuela, and songs celebrating the rich and varied Latin culture Saturday, August 11 with 2 performances on theCalder PlazaStage.
Thank you to the Hispanic Center of Western Michiganfor inviting us to partake in this year’s Grand Rapids Hispanic Festival, their organizations annual flagship event. This year’sfestival ran August 10th through August 12th. As afree and open to the public event, the festival featuredstage entertainment, artisan vendors, Latin American food vendors, kids activities, and other unique events.
The Hispanic Center of Western Michigan is celebrating 40 years and is a non-profit organization serving the needs of the Latino and broader community to provide avenues for education and openness by promoting the discussion of the distinctions and values of different nationalities and
cultures.
Opera Grand Rapids enjoyed being a part of this celebration of culture in the heart of Grand Rapids on this beautiful and sunny day. Opera Grand Rapids would also like to thank Meijer for continuing to support Opera In the Community.
This story is part of a series of 50 stories we are releasing to commemorate 50 years of opera in West Michigan. Browse more stories and follow our journey throughout the season.
“They can be as crazy as they want backstage, as demanding as they want, as long as when they hit that stage, it’s magic. If they can do that, I’ll do handstands for ‘em.” -Opera Grand Rapids Wig & Makeup Designer
Sometimes, Rob Thomasma is going to make you look bad. He’s going to age you, make you look bedraggled, poor, at the end of your rope. He’s not a cruel person. That’s just his job. As the master of hair and makeup for Opera Grand Rapids, Rob’s job is not to make people look pretty. His is a higher calling—to paint the truth of each operatic character on the face of the cast. This truth does often involve beauty, but just as often, it involves conveying the history of a hardscrabble character through makeup and wigs.
“Nobody wants to look bad,” says Rob. Sometimes his job involves “selling” singers and actors on the reality of their look. “You try to tell them, ‘You’re not going to look bad, you’re not going to look ugly. You’re just going to look older,’” says Rob. “‘Hopefully, when I’m done, you’re going to look in the mirror, and it’ll look like you’re going to shave your father’s face. You’re not going to be some grotesque.’” Rob explains that most performers know what they are getting into, in terms of roles. But concern for one’s appearance is universal, especially when a person will be onstage in front of thousands.
Finding a face that fits the director’s vision and makes the performer comfortable is an art. Sometime, this art is equal parts curling iron and negotiation. Rob recalls a time when some actors, whose characters were to be envious toward a young ingenue, had trouble accepting the look for which the roles called. “They were all pretty women,” Rob says. “[I told them], you gotta look like you just went through the school of hard knocks. You can’t have pretty, pretty hair, and we’ve gotta shadow your eyes.” After Rob finished making the actresses up, they left, and changed their makeup. Rob often receives reminders like these—that he is working with people’s most personal possession, and not everyone is ready to surrender their face to their role entirety.
Luckily, people in Rob’s chair are more often thrilled than apprehensive. “It’s always a good sign when you’re done on Friday night, and the gals don’t want to take their makeup off. They gotta go to a party and say, ‘Is it ok if I keep my makeup on?’ Yeah, you bet. It makes me feel good. Just bring your eyelashes back.”
It’s easy to understand why people might get attached to Rob’s creations, spirit gum notwithstanding. Some of his concoctions are designed to bring characters of legend to life, and the actors end up beneath locks of mythic scope. For some, the thrill of wearing a legendary temptress’s hair into one’s own life is just too rich an opportunity to skip.
“For Samson and Delilah, Delilah had hair that went way, way down,” explains Rob. “It ended up taking three wigs to make a wig that long. She wanted it all curly. I got it all put together, and she thought it was just the hottest thing. She wore it home, and you could tell, the next night when she came in with it, that her husband really liked it too.”
Delilah’s epic hairpiece began as three wigs, shipped from a company specializing in theatrical hair. Rob combined the three wigs to form a single, epic, straight-haired wig. Then Delilah told him she really wanted it to be curly. She did not understand the scope of what she was asking.
“The fastest you can set a wig, from dry to dry, to change its style, is four to six hours,” says Rob. He begins by straightening the wig with a clothes steamer. Then he roller-sets it and sets the wigs to be dried into a large box, before hooking up a hair dryer. Usually, Rob explains, you don’t blow a fuse. In the end, Rob was able to deliver the cascading curls Delilah desired.
Rob developed his expertise with hair and makeup through a combination of natural curiosity and happenstance. “I’ve been a performer ever since I was little kid,” says Rob. His first role was that of a munchkin in The Wizard of Oz. “It’s just something that came very natural to me, painting my face.” The director was so impressed with Rob’s skills that he told him to do makeup for the other children. He loved the art and the mess of his future profession. “You’d spray your hair black, and your mother would freak out because it’s all over your pillowcase. That was how it started.
Years later, Rob was backstage at Opera Grand Rapids when two of the three wig and makeup people took ill. “I did what I could, and it worked,” says Rob. “Here I am, thirty-five years later. It really has been enjoyable.”
OUR FOUNDERS HAD A BOLD PROPOSITION: to build a professional opera company that would put Grand Rapids on the map for a very discerning audience. 50 years later, we are humbled to be the modern bearers of classical standards and modern ingenuity. Learn more.
SUPPORT OUR NEXT 50 YEARS
As an integral part of our city’s artistic fabric, it’s our responsibility to see to its continual flourishing. Please consider donating to Opera Grand Rapids to ensure our artistic excellence for the next 50 years and beyond. You’ve already made us great. With your support, there’s no limits to the height our voices can reach together. Give today.
This story is part of a series of 50 stories we are releasing to commemorate 50 years of opera in West Michigan. Browse more stories and follow our journey throughout the season.
Former Opera Grand Rapids Chorus Master Duane Davis’ love of music helped him cultivate a deep expertise, though he is too humble to say as much.
Duane Davis was very young when Tosca came to Cleveland. The Metropolitan Opera was bringing Puccini’s epically grim tale to Midwestern audiences, and Duane’s mother took him to see it. The opera made an impression that would shape the rest of his life.
“Tosca, for a nine-year-old, was a pretty heavy opera,” says Duane. “But I didn’t look at the tragedy of it. I was smitten by the grandeur of it.” Duane’s mother explained what happened in each act to her son. Young Duane was floored by the spectacle. “I was so taken with it that it remained with me through my life.”
The next sixty-twos years of Duane’s life would be dominated by music from a wide range of traditions. We know him as the chorus master of Opera Grand Rapids, a post he has held since 1984. But Duane is a man of changeable faces. Some may recognize him as an adjudicator of jazz or choral festivals. Others know Duane as a musical theater personality, from his work as Music Director at Circle Theater. “I love musicals, I love opera. I love drama. Sometimes I create drama,” says Duane with a laugh.
Duane’s love of music helped him cultivate a deep expertise, though he is too humble to say as much. His forty-nine-year career included stints teaching at community college, high school, and middle school. His “retirement” consisted of teaching at Western Michigan University, then Indiana University. At the time we sat down with Duane, he had just had a piece premiered by the Grand Rapids Symphony the week before.
Like so many of us, Duane’s achievements have been punctuated by doubt. He has conducted at every major venue in New York, and many others. But self-doubt doesn’t disappear just because you make it to Carnegie Hall. “I’ve conducted at so many places, not always feeling like I was qualified to do that. But it’s because someone said, ‘You can do that!’ Someone said, ‘You can be Chorus Master. No, you don’t know everything about opera. No, you’re not fluent in those languages. But you’re a good musician, and you love people.’”
It’s this last point that makes Duane such a perfect fit for his position as Chorus Master. “A community of singers, like the chorus, they have to feel worthy. They have to feel appreciated. They have to feel like they are a community, that they’re vital in a production.” Duane wanted to be the person to instill these feelings in people, out of gratitude for those who had done the same for him.
With the chorus at his side, Duane can give himself fully to whatever he is working on. When asked to name his favorite opera, his reply is at once diplomatic and sincere. “The favorite is whatever I’m doing at the time. It sounds like what I’m supposed to say, but it’s true. I lose myself in what I’m doing, and when it’s done, I’m done, and onto the next thing. And now that’s my favorite. It has to be my favorite. I don’t want to do anything that does not move me as a human being.”
How does taste evolve for a man whose childhood obsession was Tosca? Duane’s sensibilities still gravitate toward art that provokes something in him, no matter what form or tradition that takes. Says Duane, “I love operas that touch sensitive places in me. That touch places that are disturbing.” Talking to Duane, it’s clear his ear is pressed to the pulse of the human condition. He is kind, and supremely affable—traits that are not universal in the highly erudite, competitive world of opera. His manner suggests that of a doggedly good sport, with an undercurrent of melancholy. This may be the perfect constitution for a man whose life’s work lays at the nexus of music and people.
“Opera can be hilarious, or it can be tragic. Most operas are tragic. Someone dies. Several people die,” Duane says with a rueful chuckle. “It touches deeply, especially when you’ve known life and you’ve known death.” In a career that has spanned decades, Duane has seen the panoply of human experience, onstage and off. He is still listening.
“The arts should elevate and cleanse and stir us. I still allow the arts to stir me.” He doesn’t yearn for the easily digestible, or the merely pleasing. “Do something! Disturb me in a way that makes me think a little deeper about life, about my journey, about my contribution, about things that I need to learn. I’m seventy-one and there’s still so much to learn.”
OUR FOUNDERS HAD A BOLD PROPOSITION: to build a professional opera company that would put Grand Rapids on the map for a very discerning audience. 50 years later, we are humbled to be the modern bearers of classical standards and modern ingenuity. Learn more.
SUPPORT OUR NEXT 50 YEARS
As an integral part of our city’s artistic fabric, it’s our responsibility to see to its continual flourishing. Please consider donating to Opera Grand Rapids to ensure our artistic excellence for the next 50 years and beyond. You’ve already made us great. With your support, there’s no limits to the height our voices can reach together. Give today.
This story is part of a series of 50 stories we are releasing to commemorate 50 years of opera in West Michigan. Browse more stories and follow our journey throughout the season.
Opera lovers Dave and Lorrie VanderArk take you on a visual tour through the many opera productions they have patronized through the years.
OUR FOUNDERS HAD A BOLD PROPOSITION: to build a professional opera company that would put Grand Rapids on the map for a very discerning audience. 50 years later, we are humbled to be the modern bearers of classical standards and modern ingenuity. Learn more.
SUPPORT OUR NEXT 50 YEARS
As an integral part of our city’s artistic fabric, it’s our responsibility to see to its continual flourishing. Please consider donating to Opera Grand Rapids to ensure our artistic excellence for the next 50 years and beyond. You’ve already made us great. With your support, there’s no limits to the height our voices can reach together. Give today.
Artists from Opera Grand Rapids and 
This story is part of a series of 50 stories we are releasing to commemorate 50 years of opera in West Michigan. Browse 
