Oregon Music News

Photo by Joan Marcus

David Pittsinger is singing the role of Emile de Becque in the national tour of South Pacific. The bass-baritone has garnered much praise for his performances in the world of opera and American musical theater. Earlier this year Pittsinger hit back-to-back home runs by singing in a matinée performance of South Pacific at the Lincoln Center Theater and then singing the role of Hamlet’s father at the Metropolitan Opera that evening. Noting this feat, The New York Times mentioned that Pittsinger may be the first person to have ever appeared in major roles in both houses on the same day.

When South Pacific stops in Portland (August 3-8 at Keller Auditorium), Pittsinger will be ready to portray the Frenchman with a mysterious past. I talked on the phone with Pittsinger while the show was ending its tour in Los Angeles after a run of 16 performances in 12 days.

You’ve been to Portland before?

Pittsinger: Yes. I sang Don Giovanni with Portland Opera in 2006. I started my career with Chris Mattaliano a while back and that’s been a great association ever since.

South Pacific is a nice diversion from singing opera. I’ve been enjoying singing in South Pacific at Lincoln Center and on the national tour, which has a pretty rigorous schedule.

Your singing South Pacific at Lincoln Center Theater  for a matinée performance and then singing Hamlet at the Metropolitan Opera the same evening is pretty amazing.

Pittsinger: Yes, that was big fun! The doors of the Lincoln Center Theater and the Met are only 30 or 40 feet from each other. I think that we’ll see more of this, because more singers are crossing over from opera to other kinds of singing. American music-theater, especially the works written before 1965, require legit singing.

You have quite a flexible voice, switching from Broadway tunes to Baroque Opera and then to works that require a stentorian voice.

Pittsinger: They all require different styles. But if you can sing refined music by Rameau or Mozart then you might also be interested in other styles, because styles change. That gives us the opportunity to expand our repertoire. American music theater is one more style to appreciate and learn. The music in South Pacific is like a string of pearls. It’s written and set like Verdi – so beautiful for the voice and so iconic in nature. Every song in South Pacific is a hit in its own right- from Bali Ha’i, I’m Gonna Wash That Man Right Outta My Hair, Some Enchanted Evening, Twin Soliloquies, I’m in Love with a Wonderful Guy… the list goes on. And every number has been popularized by jazz singers and crooners of the day. After South Pacific’s premiere in 1949, so many singers from Ella Fitzgerald to Sammy Davis Jr. to Frank Sinatra made these songs a staple of their shows. It really speaks highly of this particular American art form, and the fact that my part, Emile de Becque, was originally written for an opera singer Ezio Pinza who was a big star at the Met.

If you think about all of the voices that came out of American musical theater of that period like Alfred Drake, John Raitt, Robert Goulet, and so many others.

Yes, and South Pacific’s multicultural story still speaks to today.

Pittsinger: Yes, including the racism scenes – they are very relevant. We still have to same problems that are part of the story of South Pacific. We are a country at war. We still tolerate racism. When you explore South Pacific, you find that it was so far ahead of its time, and it was written when the experience of WWII was so raw.

South Pacific also shows how we grew as a nation, and how we stuck together. We were up against tremendous odds. Before the Battle of Midway, you have to realize that the Japanese navy was far superior to ours. It was only due to some poor strategic planning on the part of the Japanese and our durability and the constitution of our marines and navy that we came out on top. It was a very bloody, bloody time. This musical takes you on a big journey in three hours.

When you sang South Pacific and Hamlet on the same day, did you change anything?

Pittsinger: I sing with the same voice whether I’m in an opera or in a musical. It’s a different style, but it’s still my voice. I prepare for the demands of South Pacific in the same way that I prepare for the demands of an opera. But you do inhabit a character in a theater-based piece more than you do in opera, because in opera you only have the music and your voice to portray a character. I approach Emile de Becque in the same way but there was more to it than that, because I had to think of bringing my own life experience to the character.

The director of South Pacific, Bart Sher, on the first day that we met, said “Look, you’ve got a wife of ethnicity, you have two children who are the age of the children in the play. French is your second language, and you are an expatriate of sorts because you left the United States to work in other countries. So you don’t’ have to do anything. Just be. Just be Emile. You are Emile.

That was a wonderful approach for working this role. The hardest thing was the accent. It would’ve been much easier for me to have done the whole play in French than trying to put a French accent on my English. It turned out that the best way to do this was to improvise at our first rehearsals, translate my lines into French and deliver them in French; then we would repeat the whole scene and do it in English. That made it very easy.

Gérard Depardieu is a good friend of mine. I’ve worked with him, and he has narrated a couple of operas that I’ve done like Stravinsky’s Oedipus Rex. We were all together in Greece a couple of years ago, and I talked to him about the role of Emile de Becque. I saw a lot of him in the role: the sensitive but strong poet in this character. I thought that I’d use my relationship with Garard to refine the character to what I thought he was.

Emile is temperamental character. He is on this Pacific island because of his temper, which he lost and killed a man. That’s his baggage that he has to carry. He is in a constant kind of fight to maintain his composure and his temperament.

Bart Sher said there are others who have done this role before you who have been more like a Maurice Chevalier in the role. He told me that I was more like a Hemingway. He said that I should explore the grittier side of the character and then when I do sing the music, realize that the stakes are very high. This is your last chance at finding love. It’s a real May to December romance, and we have to hear that when you sing.

So all of these things that Bart gave me to work with I think that have helped me in my approach to operatic roles.

How did you get involved in singing?

Pittsinger: I was a boy soprano, growing up in the Episcopal Church. So I came to classical music through the church. Then I did a lot of summer stock in musical theater like Carnival, Man of La Mancha. When I went to college, I was interested in politics. I was a Republican intern under Senator Lowell Weicker of Connecticut. I was interested in speech writing and spent a lot of time in Washington DC. My freshman year in college, I was on the soccer team at the University of Connecticut during the year that we won the national championship. But I got a scholarship to pursue work in opera at the University of Connecticut. I was 19 years old when I met my voice teacher, Richard Cross, there, and he is still my teacher. He really showed the way for me. I got my masters at Yale University, and then went to the opera training program at Merola in San Francisco. I got to go right into the house and sing major roles with established artists, and from there I went to Europe where I found a lot of regular work. Since then I’ve done work all over the place. I have taken some risks, and I’ve learned how pick myself up and dust myself off. Life is full of choices.

What’s your South Pacific tour schedule like?

Pittsinger: Before we come to Portland, we perform in Denver for a week. But after the Portland performances, I’ll take a week away from the tour to fly to Vienna, Austria to start work on Handel’s Semele at the Theater on der Wien with Cecilia Bartoli in the title role.

I’ll come back and rejoin the national tour in Costa Mesa and continue as it goes to the East Coast. It’ll wind up for a long stay at Kennedy Center in Washington D.C. It will be great to stay put in one place for a while.

We are looking forward to seeing you in Portland!

Pittsinger: It’ll be great to be in the show in Portland. I’m looking forward to cooler weather. It was 106 degrees in LA today!