Loud and proud

Mezzo soprano wants to bring opera to everyone

Clara Augustin, Judd Burns and John Matthews rehearse a comic scene from Die Fledermaus for Ozark Family Opera Company's fundraiser Sunday.
Clara Augustin, Judd Burns and John Matthews rehearse a comic scene from Die Fledermaus for Ozark Family Opera Company's fundraiser Sunday.

Kierstin Blanchard Bible might not be a Valkyrie in physical stature, but she is certainly one in spirit. She believes she can not only invade Northwest Arkansas with opera but that the populace will embrace the invasion.

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Photo courtesy Cherie Miller

Kierstin Blanchard Bible, a mezzo soprano, appeared as Mother in the Heartland Opera Company production of Hansel and Gretel in 2012. Now, she plans to start an opera company in Northwest Arkansas. Hear her talk about her plans at youtube.com/nwademgaz.

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Kierstin Blanchard Bible

"Our mission is to bring affordable -- big capital 'A' -- professional, family friendly opera -- in English -- to this region," says Bible, a mezzo soprano who has a doctor of musical arts in vocal performance. "And to get the next generation excited about opera."

Go & Do

‘It’s Opera!’

When: 2:30 p.m. Sunday

Where: United Lutheran Church of Bella Vista, 100 Cooper Road

Cost: Free

Information: ozarkfamilyoperacom…

Fast Facts

Save The Date

The Ozark Family Opera Company’s first full-length performances will be a Mozart double bill, Bastien & Bastienne and The Impresario, June 3-4 at Grace Point Church in Bentonville.

To that end, Bible has formed the Ozark Family Opera Company and will host a fundraiser, titled It's Opera, on Sunday at United Lutheran Church of Bella Vista. Admission will be free, with a "love offering" requested. She's hoping to find that one donor -- or a small cadre of donors -- who will become the core of her nonprofit.

"This is not a cheap thing I've taken on," she says, "even when you do operas, like Mozart, that are in the public domain."

Bible wants to be sure the money is in place to pay for the first performance -- scheduled for June 3-4 -- even if no tickets were to be sold. That means being ready to pay singers, a director, a conductor and an orchestra -- and still charging no more than $20 for admission.

Bible wants to be clear that this will not be "community opera," even though she supports community theater.

"I want to cast professionally," she says. "We have a wealth of local talent coming out of the woodwork! There are so many professional opera singers in Northwest Arkansas, it's not even funny!"

Like so many professionals, Bible says, she teaches voice but finds few opportunities to sing.

"It's not in our official mission statement per se, but I want to give people a chance to perform. Once you get out of college, it's not easy."

The newcomer

Her dream, Sarah Webb says, was to produce musical theater of professional calibre in Northwest Arkansas. When she announced the founding of Inspire Theater in the spring of 2015, she said her goal was to "create excellent work that is entertaining, inspiring and enriching."

But the biggest joy she found in producing Man of La Mancha -- the full-length October debut for the company -- might have been sharing it with the cast.

"I wanted to do not just excellent work, but to do it in an excellent atmosphere," Webb says now. "And I had actors during the show saying, 'What are you going to do next? I want to come out for it.' It turned out to be inspiring not only to the community, but to the people involved in it."

Webb, a member of Actors' Equity Association, moved from New York to Bentonville with her husband, Geoff, part of the team that designs and delivers Walmart's Leadership Academy.

"When we found out we were moving to Northwest Arkansas, I began to research what was happening with theater in the area. I wanted to continue to grow as an artist, to be challenged and ultimately to do great work," she recalled in a May interview. "As (an Equity actor) my options were pretty limited. TheatreSquared was the only local company that consistently hired union actors. Until we moved here, I don't think I ever would have imagined myself starting a theater company."

And she still might not have, she says, had she not become involved with "a group of artists at Grace Point Church that developed into Art=Story." Grace Point also will be home to Bible's Ozark Family Opera Company.

"The church really has a vision to support local artists. One of the ways they have been doing that is through their gallery and theater spaces -- Story: The Gallery at Grace Point and The Story Theater. When they offered to provide a space for me to produce, it confirmed what I had been thinking -- that it was time to start a professional musical theater company. Thus, Inspire Theatre was born."

What surprised her, she admits, was that even with all the excitement about the new company and the production, the audiences were not the full houses for which she had hoped.

"It was a lot harder, I think, to get momentum going than I imagined it would be," she reflects. "It's not an easy thing to get something off the ground."

The company is now "taking some time off to do more infrastructure work and some fund raising," Webb says. "Financially, we can't just jump into the next project, unless we do something smaller scale. Man of La Mancha was a huge undertaking, but we wanted to do something fully. It's hard to find small shows in musical theater. It's not normally done as a small show, but the way we did it, it was. But it was still a huge undertaking.

"In the end, we were thankful for every person who made it to the show. It was an amazing process."

The veteran

Jim Swiggart, general director emeritus for Opera in the Ozarks -- a summer program that trains opera singers and stages performances at Inspiration Point west of Eureka Springs -- says "there is definitely interest in opera in the area" and also from further afield.

"We're featured every year in Opera News (magazine)," he says. "Because of who we are and our reputation, I'd guess 20 percent of our audience on any given night comes from all over the United States. That's something I'm very proud of."

The growth of the Bentonville area hasn't hurt, either, he says. "People come here and expect to have what they're used to having. We also have people who have moved here because we're here."

Opera in the Ozarks has always performed in repertory style, with each student learning several roles. Generally, three operas make up the summer season, with at least one being performed in the original language. Next summer, Swiggart says, the selections will be Mozart's Don Giovanni, Britten's Albert Herring and a double-bill of Puccini's Il Tabarro and Leoncavallo's Pagliacci. Performance dates are June 17-July 15.

But even in the 66 years Opera in the Ozarks has been around, the company has remained a summer-only venture.

"We'd like to be year around, but that takes real money -- probably $20 million," Swiggart says.

Next generation

Bible discovered Northwest Arkansas as a college student who herself came to sing at Opera in the Ozarks in 1994. In 1995, she earned an assistantship at the University of Arkansas as a master's student, graduating in 1997. She met her husband, moved to Kansas City to work on her terminal degree at the University of Missouri there and moved back to Northwest Arkansas in 2005.

Although she has always taught, Bible has recently found a niche at Bentonville High School.

"Bentonville has one of the best choir programs in the state," she says enthusiastically -- the same way she says everything. "Terry Hicks has been there close to 20 years, and he started a program last year where he brings in voice teachers to teach voice lessons during choir -- three half-hour lessons during an hour-and-a-half choir period.

"We get instant students. The school gets three really experienced voice teachers, and the choir gets students taking voice lessons. These are really great kids who love to sing, want to be better singers, are very competitive with themselves. He's got over 650 kids in his choirs.

"It's so exciting to see so many kids in love with choir," Bible adds. "He pushes them really hard, which lets us push them -- because they want to get in to the top choirs."

Bible says that level of commitment isn't that unusual in high school now -- although she went off to college without even auditioning. She immediately had to choose between music and theater -- it was easy, she says -- and then she saw and heard opera for the first time.

"I was just bowled over," she says. "That's what I hope to do with (the Ozark Family Opera Company.) People perceive opera to be upper crust or boring. But if you can drag someone in, even kicking and screaming, nine times out of 10, they come out saying, 'That was cool.'"

NAN Our Town on 11/12/2015

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