A renovated food truck showcases opera with mobile performances in Portland

For nearly a decade, Portlanders have had the opportunity to see professional opera performances for free in various locations across the city.

It’s all part of the Opera a la Cart, Portland Opera’s mobile performance venue. The program started as a way to expose a wider audience to the centuries-old artform. Every summer, the group sets up shop in a different park.

The stage has a very different look than the grand theaters typically associated with opera. The Opera a la Cart crew operates out of a former food truck — which at one time served popcorn — renovated for performances.

Alexis Hamilton, Portland Opera’s associate director of education outreach, said the idea was inspired by Portland’s well-known food cart scene.

“You get to have a full menu of operatic and musical theater and jazz standards all in one package in the summertime,” Hamilton said.

On a hot summer Wednesday, the truck set up in the middle of Pioneer Courthouse Square. Within minutes, they already had a small audience, many of them enthusiasts who attend multiple shows each summer.

It’s simple enough to set up the performance. The food truck has a wooden stage that folds down from its side into a ready-made performance space. Add a few microphones and a couple of speakers, and soon the square became an impromptu performance space, as office workers milled about in the street.

Alexis Walker is the manager of Opera a la Cart and said the idea is to keep it simple, both for the performers and the audience.

“We set up a stage, we bring some amazing singers and a legendary pianist to play some diddlies, and then we go home,” Walker said. “Keep it sweet, keep it simple.”

The goal is to increase interest in opera in the community, but the performers don’t just stick to operatic classics, like those from “La Boheme” or “Pagliacci.” At this performance, they perform musical theater pieces from “Oklahoma” and “Les Misérables.”

For tenor Nathaniel Catasca, the cart may be far removed from the high production values he’s used to performing with, but it has some benefits as well.

“There’s a bit of shock, there’s surprise,” Catasca said. “People don’t really know what they’re listening to until they actually hear it. And we’ve gotten a lot of people who are really interested in coming for the first time through that, and they kind of want to know more about it.”

Hamilton said it’s unclear if the Opera a la Cart performances have translated to increased ticket sales. But she said the main goal is to spread awareness.

It also offers a more personal experience with the audience — Catasca said he normally can’t see anyone when he’s singing on stage.

All available chairs were filled during the recent performance, while passersby wandered in throughout the show, lured in by the music emanating from the square. Some audience members said they enjoyed having a more accessible way to see live opera.

“This is kind of wonderful to have it here,” Polly Jackson said. “Even though there’s also other noise, it’s like, ‘Oh, that’s kind of cool. We’re out here in the middle of the city.’”

For Catasca, that’s one of the main successes of Opera a la Cart. Opera sometimes has a reputation for being inaccessible for many people, with a daunting history and culture that can deter newcomers. But he said it’s a universal artform.

“Some people question whether they’re relevant today,” Catasca said. “But opera, in and of itself, talks about the human condition all of the time.

“I think it’s something really cool to see that, hundreds of years ago, people were dealing with the very same things that we are dealing with.”

Correction: An earlier version of this story listed the incorrect names for the performers in the photo captions. OPB regrets the error.