When I was trying to do research on this week’s profile — Opera Philadelphia’s vice president of education and community programs, Michael Bolton — that pesky other fella kept coming up. They both are involved with opera but our Michael actually got better reviews than that pop guy.
PGN: Tell me about the time and place you were born.
MB: I was born in Delaware County on Labor Day: Sept. 2, 1968. There was a little bit of a surprise for my mother because there was another person in there with me that she didn’t know about. I came out and they said, “Oh, you have another one in there.” It turned out my twin and I had been on top of each other. Back in 1968, they weren’t as sophisticated as now and had only detected one heartbeat. So I have a twin sister. I’ve lived in Delaware County all of my life, except for one-and-a-half years in Manayunk. I was a voice major at Temple University. It was clear that I had a passion for opera but I realized pretty quickly that I was not going to be the next Samuel Ramey.
PGN: What sparked that passion?
MB: The movie “Amadeus.” I went to see it when I was about 15. And hearing the Queen of the Night aria from “The Magic Flute” and the music from “The Marriage of Figaro” and “Don Giovanni” literally changed my life.
PGN: Was loving opera at 15 your first clue that you might be gay?
MB: Not really. I kept thinking to myself, Eventually I’m going to like girls, eventually I’m going to like girls. That clearly never happened. I came out to myself when I was about 20 and came out to my family when I was about 26.
PGN: Tell me a little about the family.
MB: My mom was a stay-at-home mom. God bless us she’s still with us and she’ll be 82 in October. Yesterday was the 14th anniversary of my father’s passing, so he’s very much on my mind today. My dad was a maintenance man, very blue-collar. I’m the only artistic one in the family. I really have no idea how that happened. I have four sisters and my twin, Patty, and I are the youngest of the five. I was always singing around the house so my mother suggested I join the choir. At 10 years old, my voice had already changed so I sounded like this [deep baritone]. [Laughs.] I’ve never been carded!
PGN: What did you do for family fun?
MB: We had a pool, so we were always swimming. In the winter we went Christmas caroling. It was a pretty typical blue-collar upbringing. I had a good childhood.
PGN: Did you live in a dorm at Temple?
MB: No, I commuted.
PGN: What was the worst class you had to take?
MB: Music theory. No, wait. Piano! I still can’t play. I can tap out a line or two but don’t ask me to play with two hands!
PGN: Who was a favorite teacher?
MB: Oh, there was one teacher who I just adored though no one else was particularly fond of her. She taught music in history and I found it fascinating; it actually influences a lot of what we do here. It was very contextualized: How do the arts respond to the needs of the time? Which is what art does — all art responds to culture, all art responds to what is happening. Two other teachers who were really pivotal for me were my high-school Spanish teacher, Aurora Moral, and my high-school choir teacher, Susan Descano, who is retiring soon so I’ll be going to an event for her later this year. It was those two who … we do a lot of outreach with our Sounds of Learning project and sometimes we forget how important it is for a young impressionable teenager to get positive affirmation from someone who has no skin in the game, you know, who believes in you and trusts in you and inspires you to be the best that you can be. And that’s what those two … sorry, it gets me emotional just thinking about it. That’s what those two did for me.
PGN: Gotta love good teachers. What was the first opera you ever sang in?
MB: Oh, there weren’t many. I mostly did some school productions and a couple of amateur productions with Concert Opera Philadelphia. But that was a long time ago. I generally work behind the scenes. I’m on the board of the Children’s Opera Box, the Lansdowne Arts board and the Historic Lansdowne Theater Corporation. Now that the Boyd Theater is closed, Lansdowne is the last art-house palace left in the area. We are raising funds to restore it and turn it into a Keswick-style theater.
PGN: How long have you been with Opera Philadelphia?
MB: Since 2001. I got my foot in the door managing the telemarketing team. I’d never done anything like that before but I managed to run the most successful telemarketing team up to that date.
PGN: [Laughs.] I think I may have gotten one of those calls in the middle of dinner.
MB: Probably! I ended up transferring to development when an employee in the development department broke both of her ankles getting off of a SEPTA bus.
PGN: Was that some evil understudy action? You broke her ankles so you could get her job?
MB: [Laughs.] No, no! She actually stepped off the bus, hit the uneven curb and broke her ankle. Then, when she stepped back to catch her balance, she broke the other one! And she’d just gotten back from a ski trip accident-free!
PGN: Yikes! So tell me about some of the outreach work you’re doing now.
MB: We have a lot of different programs starting with the Sounds of Learning program. With that, we offer in-school classes for free, all of which are geared towards enhancing the curriculum and are based on various aspects of opera that can be used in the classroom. For instance, we do Opera 101, which really evokes critical thinking. We’ll ask the kids, “What do you think opera is?” and we’ll show them the Bugs Bunny “Kill the Wabbit” cartoon. We talk about the storylines and the characters and what it takes to make a good opera. Then we’ll look at a scene from “Dreamgirls” where she sings “And I am Telling You, I’m Not Going” and we’ll talk about characterization. What is Jennifer Hudson telling us with her facial expressions and tone of voice and body language? How does the music change to affect her emotions at that moment in time? The kids really get into it. Then we use those skills and show them a scene from an opera called “Cavalleria Rusticana,” which dramatically is the exact same situation. Both of the women are pregnant and want the guy to stay, but he wants to leave. Even though she’s singing in a foreign language, they can understand what’s happening. They get the connections between the stories and they’re proud of themselves. They get really hooked into it! We also do Singing 101, which is kind of a biology lesson where we teach the kids how singers use their anatomy to get that full operatic sound. We use balloons to test their lung capacity, and talk about how opera singers use resonance in their face and chest to be able to project to a full opera house. We do a contest to see who has the most lung capacity and the kids get super-engaged in that. We also do “Soundtrack to the Story,” which is about getting kids to listen to a variety of music critically as well as creatively. They’ll listen to instrumental pieces from Mozart to Dave Brubeck and we’ll ask them things like, “If you were to design a fabric or wallpaper based on this music, what would it look like?” “Write a story about what you just heard in those three minutes of music.” And the fourth thing we do is our conducting class, where we teach them about meter and rhythm in everyday life and speech. We try to put as many tie-ins to make it as relevant to kids as possible.
PGN: That’s amazing. You’re making me want to go back to school.
MB: [Laughs.] Yes, it’s exciting. We also have a six-to-eight-week program where kids learn about a particular opera and then get to come to the Academy and see it performed. As of now, we have 1,880 kids scheduled to come see “Don Giovanni.” They’ll get information about everything from Mozart to the architecture of the Academy of Music. We’ll give them fun facts, like the fact that invisible ink was created around the same time that the opera was written.
PGN: So cool. And what is Hip H’opera?
MB: That’s a collaboration between Opera Philadelphia and Art Sanctuary. We combine classical music style with hip-hop. It started out with kids writing poems that we then set to music by classical composers. The songs were then performed by classically trained singers and musicians. Now it’s a three-year project where the kids start out in the first year writing about their personal stories, then they go through teaching intensive learning from professional poets, dancers, even photographers. In the third year, they learn about careers in the arts and participate in creating their own opera, which will be premiered in 2015. Daniel Bernard Roumain is the composer this year. In addition to having his doctorate in composing, he’s also a past “American Idol” contestant and performed with Lady Gaga, so the kids are really excited to work with him.
PGN: I heard that you personally do warm-up sessions before performances for adults.
MB: Yes, as part of Opera Overtures we do a free pre-performance talk one hour before every performance. They are free for ticketholders and very fun and informal. We also have A Taste of Opera, which are free classes for adults about the various operas. It helps people get more engaged in and have better insight into what the opera is all about. For “Don Giovanni,” an interesting insight is that both Mozart and Lorenzo Da Ponte, the librettist, knew Casanova personally. The legendary Italian lover helped shape the opera. And Da Ponte actually lived in Philadelphia for a while.
PGN: Tell me about your “random acts of culture.”
MB: Oh, those are fun. We’ve been doing “pop-up” performances throughout the city since 2010. Two of our favorites have been flash-mob-type of performances that we did at the Reading Terminal Market and a 650-voice pop-up choir at Macy’s. The YouTube videos are great; we got over 10 million hits!
PGN: I used to do some pretty good faux opera when I was a kid; still do. How about you?
MB: [Laughing] I do a great Violetta from “Traviata,” the death scene. Because she’s sick and has tuberculosis, it sounds like something that would be on “The Sopranos.” [Says something in Italian in a gravelly mobster voice.] I need a couple of drinks for it, but you can find it on Facebook if you look hard enough.
PGN: A memorable theater moment? MB: I was in New York, watching a production of Leos Janacek’s “The Makropoulos Case” and one of the actors died on stage. It was pretty memorable, also — and this is my opera-queen moment — Leonie Rysanek was a legendary Austrian soprano and I managed to get a front-row seat at her farewell at The Met. I was literally right behind the conductor. That was one of those magical moments where you got to say goodbye to a beloved diva.
PGN: You do so much work with the kids. Anything that stands out?
MB: It comes back to those interpersonal moments. When we did the first go-around of Hip-H’opera, there was one young girl who was a bundle of issues. She would always just stare at the floor; she was uncomfortable looking anyone in the eye. You could see in everything she did that she was unsure of herself and felt unworthy. She wrote a poem that was a love letter to her grandmother, called “My Dearest Grandma.” Her poem was the hit of the phase-one portion of the Hip H’opera program. She was invited to read and have the musical version of the poem performed at the governor’s mansion and again at the Kimmel Center several months later. The change in this girl from when we started the program in October to June was remarkable. She became confident and comfortable in her own skin, she made eye contact with everyone. It was inspiring. It was all these little steps that came together to let her know that she had value, that she was worthy. We find that happening again with a kid in our program this year. It’s not every kid that you can touch, but there’s always that one that makes the connection, who realizes, here is one person who doesn’t know you from Adam but has that faith in you that I talked about before. He or she lets you know that they believe in you, and helps you realize that you’re going to make it through. With all the grand programs that we do, it’s some of those small connections that make these programs so great.
PGN: Beautiful. Now for some random questions. Favorite Motown or Philly-based song?
MB: Philly: Frankie Avalon’s “Venus.” It’s one of my all-time favorite songs. Motown song would be Aretha Franklin’s “Until You Come Back to Me.”
PGN: Basia does a great cover of that song.
MB: Oh, really? Yay. They’re from Poland and I’m very proud of my Polish roots. Here’s something interesting: My great- grandparents [from Poland] were supposed to come over on the Titanic but they missed the boat. They ended up coming over on a cattle boat instead.
PGN: I can’t resist a guy who …
MB: Has facial hair, blue eyes and broad shoulders. [Laughs.] I’m describing my partner, Peter.
PGN: Cheater! How did you two meet?
MB: On Match.com. [Laughs.] I joined it because I saw his picture and thought he was devastatingly handsome. We’ve known each other for 10 years and been together for seven. There was a little misfire at first, but now we live together in Lansdowne and have a dog, Otto. We call him Otolaryngologist [does a rim shot]. We also have a fellow who lives with us through a life-sharing program; he’s intellectually disabled. It’s the best thing I’ve ever done in my entire life.
PGN: If you had to live in an opera, which one would it be?
MB: This is going to be cheesy. I would say “La Boheme.” Only because it’s about young people having fun; well, at least the first two acts. But the opera character I relate to the most is Figaro, in “The Marriage of Figaro.” He’s a good guy.
PGN: Number-one thing on your bucket list?
MB: Number one would be, I have to go to Italy, I have to go to Italy, I have to go to Italy.
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