Last year over 7,000 people gathered on camp chairs and picnic blankets to hear the opera “Carmen” at Peninsula Park in Portland. It was a performance staged by the organization Opera in the Park, which aims to share the love of opera with as many people as possible. This year the organization will bring the Oregon premiere of the world’s first Mariachi opera, “Cruzar la Cara de la Luna,” to both Portland and Hillsboro.
Ashley Clark, the executive director of Opera in the Park, and Nicholas Fox, the artistic director, join us to talk about the performance.
Note: The following transcript was transcribed using AI and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.
Gemma DiCarlo: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Gemma DiCarlo. Opera can be intimidating, but Portland’s Opera in the Park is trying to make it less so. The organization has put on free productions of famous operas in parks across the city since 2003. This year, they’re expanding to Hillsboro, where they’ll present the Oregon premiere of “Cruzar la Cara de la Luna.” It’s billed as the world’s first mariachi opera.
Ashley Clark is the executive director of Opera in the Park. Nicholas Fox is the organization’s artistic director. They both joined me to talk about this summer’s performances. Welcome to you both.
Nicholas Fox: Thank you. It’s a pleasure to be here.
Ashley Clark: Thank you.
DiCarlo: Nicholas, starting with you – you work with the Portland Opera in addition to Opera in the Park. What is it that you love about opera?
Fox: Well, the source of it all, going way back, is just music. I love music. When I went to school in New York – music school there at the Mannes College of Music – I was surrounded by opera singers, opera teachers. So I had always loved the music, just listening to it. But when I was in school, as a pianist and conductor, I was immersed in all of that. I found that not only was it very exciting artistically, but it was also a way to make a living.
So, that was the initial, professional entry point. Ever since then it’s just where I’ve found my home professionally most of the time. I studied as just a plain, old symphonic conductor, but putting together millions of moving pieces artistically, logistically, choreographically and cinematographically of opera is just incredibly overwhelming, but when it works, there’s really almost nothing more transcendent. So it doesn’t always work, but when it does …
The artists and the people who put it together, the day after, they have a drink and they wipe the sweat from their brow. And then the day after that, they go, wow, that was amazing, what we just did. We shouldn’t have been able to do that, but we did. It’s this giant circus maximus of art.
So that’s what I love about it. But going way back to the magma underneath all of that, it’s just the music. I love music and opera is music.
DiCarlo: Absolutely. And Ashley, what’s the goal of Opera in the Park? Why take opera outside?
Clark: The mission of Opera in the Park Portland is to provide access to grand opera with full orchestra, full chorus, and solo singers from all over the country and all over the world, at the highest caliber. All of that music [is] free and open to the public. So we are about having world-class music, the absolute best, and having it free and open to anyone who can enjoy it. Children can enjoy it. They don’t have to sit, they can squirrel around. They don’t need to sit still. People who might not otherwise go to the opera are sometimes in the park and just completely drawn into the stage and what we’re doing. And to experience that firsthand, there’s nothing like it. So, yeah, that is our goal: to bring it to everybody.
DiCarlo: I saw that last year you had 7,000 people come out to watch “Carmen” at Peninsula Park, which I understand is one of your biggest years yet. What was that performance like, both for you all to put on and for audiences to hear?
Fox: It’s amazing, just to echo and add supplement to what Ashley said. It’s all about dispelling the notion that the arts or the classic fine arts, of which opera is, is the provenance only of the wealthy. It’s one of the many things in our country where it has the reputation, justified in many ways, of being only for those of means. That’s really a tragedy because art speaks not only to everybody, but it speaks especially to those who struggle, right? Art reflects the struggle of humankind.
So to do a piece like “Carmen,” and to do it in front of presumably thousands of people who’ve never heard an opera live before, perhaps because they could not afford it or they felt that it was not for them, to bring them “Carmen” – arguably the world’s most popular operas – you are quite literally changing people’s lives. You aren’t satisfying merely the tastes of the upper class. You are changing people’s lives who didn’t even realize that was gonna happen, and you can feel that in the air.
So it’s overwhelming really, because it’s not just about the music, it’s not another gig. It’s central to the whole mission of what the arts should be, which is to speak to every individual person, no matter their background.
DiCarlo: So with all that in mind, how do you choose which operas to perform each year?
Fox: Well, up until this year, because part of that mission was also as a way of introduction to people who might be newer to opera, our choice of repertoire has traditionally been one of the classic repertoire pieces – pieces like “Carmen” and “La Traviata,” “La Bohème,” “Rigoletto,” classic pieces from the so-called European canon. We took a little bit of a turn this year. And we chose to do something that we feel actually maximizes, actually doubles our mission. Not only is it grand opera in the way we have always presented it, with no monetary barrier, but the piece itself, the story and the style of the music, also speaks to a demographic that may not have had access to opera before [and] tells a story that’s extremely … topical is not even a strong enough word. It’s almost life or death. And it’s telling a story that all of us are reading about every day in the headlines. So that was a big part of it. So in a way, this piece is almost the most forcefully-applied iteration of our mission.
DiCarlo: What is “Cruzar la Cara de la Luna” about?
Fox: “Cruzar la Cara de la Luna” is about a Mexican family, the Velasquez family. It starts in the 1960s. There’s a large time frame from the 1960s to the present, or 2010 when the piece was written. It’s that present. And it tells the story of a Mexican family that engages in what was known in real life as the Bracero Program, which was a program the U.S. government implemented to bring Mexican migrants for agricultural work with temporary residency. So there was a huge wave of migrant workers in the ‘60s and ‘70s in this program, and it tells a story of a Mexican family.
The patriarch of that family leaves his family in Mexico for what they presume to be just a temporary stay in Texas. But that stay eventually becomes permanent, and he doesn’t go back, and all of the ramifications of that, how that tears the family apart, how that makes them reckon with, who am I? The patriarch has American-born children. What is my identity? Where do I live? The Mexican family that he left reckons with the same things. There’s an attempt to meet him in Texas that doesn’t fail.
So it’s a story about a Mexican migrant family and how migration both tears them apart, but then brings them back together again. And the piece itself is an opera. People ask, “Well, what does mariachi opera mean? What does that mean exactly?” It really just means those two things. It’s not really any more complicated than that. It’s an opera, so it has a full chorus, a full orchestra, opera singers, but the style of the music is influenced by and is directly connected to mariachi. So it’s really like a perfect confluence of the two things. It’s an opera that’s mariachi.
DiCarlo: Ashley, you’ll be performing at Peninsula Park again this year. This opera will be performed at Peninsula Park again this year, but also out in Hillsboro. Why?
Clark: Yeah, so we have, in the past, only performed one performance in Portland. There were a few years there that we did two that were both in Portland at the old Concordia College. But this year, we decided that we would like to see if there’s another city that would like to host us. So we thought about the content of this opera and the fact that it is bilingual in Spanish, which not very many operas are. We thought that since Hillsboro has such a large Latino population, that maybe that would be a good home for this.
We reached out to the city of Hillsboro and Hillsboro Parks and Recreation, and they were enthusiastic about hosting us there. So we have been partners with them for the past year, bringing this to Hillsboro, and I think it’s gonna be a wonderful turnout.
DiCarlo: We touched on this a bit earlier, but why this opera this year? What do you hope the audiences will take away from it?
Clark: Well, I don’t really know how to say anything better than what Nick has already said. But one thing about when we are doing the canon that I like is that a lot of people who are not familiar with opera or they do not realize that they are familiar with it, they might hear one of the arias and identify with it – like, “oh, I heard that in ‘Moonstruck,’” or “I’ve heard that before [and] didn’t realize that it was from this opera.” That’s going to be totally different this year because people will not have heard it before. But it will expand their minds of what opera is and what opera can be.
So very close to what Nick has said. I think you explained it very well when you say that opera is not something that is stuck in stone. It is something that can evolve, can change and can be many things. Opera has always been influenced by a lot of different cultures, life experiences, and this opera does the same. So I’m hoping that people will identify with it maybe on a personal level, but also identify with it or recognize it as something that should be celebrated, that it is opera and that opera is more than just one thing.
Fox: If I can give an example, last week we did a brief preview. We performed a couple selections at a church in Hillsboro of a mostly Mexican congregation. Several people came up to me from the congregation afterwards saying some variation of, “I’ve never heard opera before” and “I didn’t know it could be like this.” So hearing responses like that is very much, I think, satisfying and gratifying, and it speaks part of why we chose to do it.
DiCarlo: Absolutely. Ashley, this, as I understand it, is an entirely volunteer-run operation. What does it take to put these productions together?
Clark: Yeah, it is primarily volunteer run and we have a volunteer board. I’m the executive director. Nick is the artistic director. But what does it take? Well, in the past we have partnered with the city of Portland, and they have hosted us. In the last couple of years, we have found that we are no longer able to do that because of the well-known citywide budget cuts.
We’ve partnered with Fuller Events and they have done a fantastic job of figuring out all the logistics. Because we have nearly 100 artists on stage, we have to take the stage that is already at Peninsula Park or at Shute Park, and we build it out. So we hired local stage builders to build it out. We build a temporary green room. We permit from the city. So we actually rent the park from the city and we fundraise to pay for that. And we rent porta potties, we hire EMTs. We do all of the logistics through Fuller Events, or in Hillsboro, through Hillsboro Parks and Rec. But it really takes about a year to prepare for this.
Nick does the casting. We have 40 members in our chorus. They are mostly local and regional. And then we have a union orchestra. So we work with the union, too. This year, I think it’s 48 members in our orchestra. It’s the largest orchestra that we’ve ever had.
Fox: This is the biggest thing we’ve ever done. There’s gonna be almost 100 performers on stage – all paid – nine soloists, a 48-member orchestra and a 40-member chorus. And the orchestra includes three local mariachi musicians.
DiCarlo: And Ashley, where can people see these performances if they want to come?
Clark: This Friday, on July 24 at 6:30 p.m., though I recommend arriving at least an hour early, you can come to Shute Park in Hillsboro. There will be the concert, there will be food carts. Bring a blanket, bring some chairs, make yourself comfortable. There are no barriers to entry. Just come, bring your kids, bring everybody.
And then on Sunday, the 26th, two days later, we will be presenting it again at 6 p.m. Again, arrive at least one hour early. And that is in Peninsula Park in Portland. Again, we will have food carts. It’s a big park. Come enjoy. We are expecting to reach 10,000 people across the two concerts, but still, these parks are big. So you have plenty of room to kind of move around and stretch out, dance if you’d like.
DiCarlo: Wow. Well, best of luck with it. Ashley Clark and Nicholas Fox. Thank you both for joining me.
Fox: Thank you.
Clark: Thank you.
DiCarlo: Ashley Clark is the executive director of Opera in the Park. Nicholas Fox is the organization’s artistic director.
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