In with the New

For the second time in the company’s twenty-seven-year history, North Star Opera is reinventing itself. What began in 1980 as Opera St. Paul became Northstar Opera in 1986, a change that also brought a different programming focus. Now, Northstar is metamorphosing into Skylark Opera (“Skylark” was chosen because it was more evocative than the more literal Northstar) and donning a new logo and motto—“Familiar, new, and out of the blue.”

The current rebranding coincides with the hiring of Mark Junkert as the company’s managing director. “We underwent a rebranding study funded by the Bush Foundation and discovered that most people didn’t know who we were,” Junkert says. “Or they had the perception that we were not professional.” Junkert, who recently returned to the Twin Cities from New York, where he served as the executive director of the Collegiate Chorale, admits that when he last lived here, that perception kept him from attending Northstar productions, despite attending shows all over town.

In addition, he says, Northstar became known as “the operetta company.” As Skylark, the company will present a diversity of opera, operetta, and musical theater—a mission it moved away from in recent years, but embraces in its inaugural season with this month’s production of Kurt Weill’s musical Lost in the Stars, followed by Sigmund Romberg’s operetta The Student Prince in June, and the area premiere of Ned Rorem’s new opera, Our Town, in the fall. Skylark has also committed to doing three productions a year—“One or two, that’s not a season,” says Junkert, who promises they’ll all be full productions. “There will be no more scaled-down cabarets because we don’t have the money to do more.”

Skylark also will no longer perform exclusively in the E. M. Peterson Theater at Concordia University. “It’s a college. It screams amateur,” Junkert says. The Student Prince will be there, but Lost in the Stars is at the 250-seat Ritz Theater. Skylark is also an artistic partner with the Schubert Theatre, so it will produce shows there once the building is renovated. Junkert acknowledges there’s a risk in asking audiences to follow them to unfamiliar venues, but he feels the move is essential to a more professional image.

For all Junkert’s enthusiasm, these are still precarious times for the company. “We are climbing out of a $100,000 debt on a budget of $300,000, which is a lot,” he says. “We’ve gotten costs in line with what we’re raising. The next task is to pay down the debt.” That the company can afford Junkert only on a half-time basis is emblematic of its financial situation (he also works half-time as executive director of the New York–based Martina Arroyo Foundation).

Lost in the Stars, a challenging work of contemporary relevance, is a strong choice for the company’s debut. The 1949 musical, based on Alan Paton’s book Cry, the Beloved Country, is a tale of racism and redemption in apartheid South Africa. Weill wrote works across the musical theater spectrum, including traditional musicals (Lady in the Dark), operas (The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny), and works that straddle both genres, as Lost in the Stars does. The music for Lost in the Stars is more sophisticated than most musicals, especially for the period. It makes particularly strong demands on the chorus, and the songs assigned to the lead, a black pastor whose son is executed, are closer to free-flowing operatic monologues than to traditional thirty-six-bar songs.

New York–based bass Kenneth Overton sings the pastor and South African–born tenor Phumzile Sojola sings his son, casting choices that represent another major change. From its beginnings as Opera St. Paul, the company committed itself to providing opportunities for local singers. That will continue, but no longer exclusively.

Hopefully the changes will help the new company take flight and keep it soaring. March 24–April 1. Ritz Theater, 345 13 Ave. NE, Mpls., 651-209-6689

Reach William Randall Beard at randybeard@hotmail.com.