June 19, 2011 By STEVE SMITH
ST. LOUIS — The Opera Theater of St. Louis is a small, hardy institution not averse to risk. Its choice of John Adams’s “Death of Klinghoffer,” which opened triumphantly on Wednesday, was only the latest proof. Founded in 1976 and modeled after the Santa Fe Opera, another seasonal company, the theater earned its renown by championing opera in English, including standard works sung in translation, and by offering premieres and unusual, important revivals among its steady supply of user-friendly chestnuts.
Seen again on Friday, James Robinson’s production of “The Death of Klinghoffer” seemed even more insightful and humane, the ensemble more assured, the technical issues of the premiere largely resolved. You marveled anew at Christopher Magiera’s nobility as the Captain; Brian Mulligan’s penetrating eloquence as Leon Klinghoffer; and the emotional nuance Nancy Maultsby brought to the role of Marilyn Klinghoffer. But you were reminded by empty seats that this opera’s rehabilitation remains a work in progress.
Risk of a different kind surfaced in Debussy’s “Pelléas and Mélisande” (seen on Thursday). In its original French, the opera is a luscious wallow in melancholy and opacity; its libretto, by Maurice Maeterlinck, verges on impenetrability in its portrayal of star-crossed love and fratricide. Here, in Hugh Macdonald’s fine English translation, the opera could still seem inarticulate, its passions conveyed best by Debussy’s ravishing orchestra.
In the hands of the director David Alden, alas, most of the characters were not only unknowable but also unlovable. Golaud, however earnestly enacted and strongly sung by Gregory Dahl, was a squalid brute from the start. Mélisande, elegantly voiced by Corinne Winters, was a feral waif, bug-eyed and twitching; the old King Arkel, grandfather to Golaud and Pelléas, a doddering wretch despite John Cheek’s heroic mien.
In Liam Bonner, a lyrical, expressive baritone, the production had an impetuous Pelléas. Michael Kepler Meo, a poised boy soprano, was an outstanding Yniold; Maria Zifchak, a dignified Geneviève. Members of the St. Louis Symphony played sublimely for Stephen Lord, the company’s music director.
Adam Silverman’s lighting design used shadow acutely, with characters partly or wholly invisible at times. Still, this was largely a lugubrious, tone-deaf pageant of the walking dead, played out against leafy green wallpaper and tatty wood-grain veneer.
Zombies — or something like them — also played a part in Mozart’s “Don Giovanni” (seen on Saturday night), in the form of spectral supernumeraries who repeatedly materialized to remind the libertine of the title that his days were numbered. The production, jointly directed by Mr. Robinson and Michael Shell, turned on a conception of Don Giovanni as a reckless sociopath, serial rapist and murderer, whose lupine charm fails to mask a frat-boy carnality expressed in pelvic thrusts and worse.
Daniel Okulitch, scheduled to play the don here, withdrew because of serious injuries sustained in an automobile accident in April. Catapulted into the spotlight was Elliot Madore, a young baritone and a winner of the Metropolitan Opera’s 2010 National Council Auditions, who sang the role under James Levine at the Tanglewood Festival in 2009.
To judge by Mr. Madore’s robust singing and take-no-prisoners acting, he has a stellar future ahead; called on to be repulsive, he excelled. Levi Hernandez stood out as a comic, relatable Leporello. Maria Kanyova was a sympathetic Donna Anna; Kishani Jayasinghe a pitiable Donna Elvira; Kathryn Leemhuis an unusually grounded Zerlina.
In the pit the conductor and fortepianist Jane Glover steered a musically watertight performance. But over all the tone was strident and enervating. Despite clever details, like the don’s bedroom wallpapered with self-portraits, the staging felt both pretentious and cheap: a mélange of disparate costumes splattered against a flat blue backdrop and a curtain ostentatiously emblazoned with Mozart’s signature.
Both “Don Giovanni” and another repertory offering, Donizetti’s “Daughter of the Regiment” (seen on Saturday afternoon), take amusing potshots at “Una Cosa Rara,” a once popular opera by Vincente Martín y Soler revived by the Opera Theater of St. Louis in 2008. But that and the choreographer Sean Curran were all that these two canonical presentations had in common.
Mr. Curran, also responsible for the choreography in “The Death of Klinghoffer” and “Pélleas and Mélisande,” directed the Donizetti opera. Wisely, he embraced it as the frothy entertainment it is, setting its antics and merry dances behind army-drum footlights against a handsome false proscenium. Christopher Akerlind’s lighting bathed performers in a golden glow; John McDaniel, the conductor, supplied pert pacing.
The soprano Ashley Emerson has probably grown tired of the adjective perky, yet it perfectly suited the vibrancy with which this diminutive singer commanded the stage. Armed with a bright smile, a pealing voice ideally suited to the intimate Virginia Jackson Browning Theater, and a gift for physical comedy, Ms. Emerson was captivating as Marie, an abandoned youth raised by a French Army troop, here jacketed in bright red coats less faithful to history than to a “Babes in Toyland” imaginary ideal.
As Tonio, Marie’s peasant lover, the charming tenor René Barbera hit his notorious nine high C’s and considerably more, securely and seemingly effortlessly. Dorothy Byrne’s haughty Marquise of Berkenfeld and Dale Travis’s wise Sulpice were pitch-perfect characterizations. And Sylvia McNair, in a luxuriously cast cameo as the Duchess of Crackentorp, turned a neatly updated Flanders & Swann song, “A Word on My Ear,” into the most dazzling display of intentionally horrific singing since Judy Kaye’s unforgettable portrayal of the hapless socialite diva Florence Foster Jenkins in Stephen Temperley’s drama “Souvenir.”
The Opera Theater of St. Louis season runs through Sunday in the Virginia Jackson Browning Theater at Webster University; (314) 961-0644; opera-stl.org.
About a year ago, by coincidence and way before being approached to interview her, out of curiosity I Googled Sylvia McNair. There was a time in the 1980s when America seemed to chum out world-class sopranos almost by the crate, among them Carol Vaness, Aprile Millo, Cheryl Studer, Sharon Sweet and Susan Dunn, and amidst even this formidable competition, if you wanted to hear a voice of such clarity and sheer beauty that it could stop you in your tracks, you turned to Sylvia McNair. There was a translucence to her voice no matter how high it went, that made everything she did seem genuinely and deeply felt—it was as though you could “see” through the voice, straight into her heart. These qualities, allied to a natural, unaffected acting ability, made her among the most in-demand singers in the world, a frequent presence on our stages and in the recording studio and a two-time Grammy Award winner. Then she seemed to just disappear. And the classical music world has barely heard of her since. That’s why I Googled her. What I found was astonishing.
Her website is fronted by a personal letter from her to “Dear friends.” It attests that she’s still “alive and kickin’” and that “the songs [I sing] have all changed because the reasons I sing have changed.” A little more Googling reveals that Sylvia McNair was diagnosed with cancer in 2006. She beat it, she’s back but when I interview her ahead of her appearance at Ravinia this summer, she says with feeling that a return to opera [which she gave up before the cancer] is out of the question. And that feeling, to my surprise, is relief.
“After 20 years of singing opera and all kinds of classical music in some of the best places in the world, I made the very difficult decision to stop doing opera and start doing music that I have always loved but never had the time to pursue,” she explains. “I was at an age where it was time to change my opera repertoire in any case. Because when you get to your early 40’s you can’t continue doing the repertoire of your 20’s and 30’s, the Susannas, the Paminas, the Anne Truloves, all those light lyric roles that I’d made my living singing. It was time to shift gears and proceed to the slightly heavier Mozart and Strauss parts—Donna Anna, Donna Elvira, the Countess. When this dawned on me, I had just finished an enormously stressful production of Handel’s Giulio Cesare at the Met and I realized that I was tired—and not just a little bit, it turned out. I had been running at top speed for 20 years.”
So she paused, and when she paused, she realized that she was undergoing an artistic burnout that had everything to do with the sense of not being true to herself or her gifts. “I realized that rather than changing opera repertoire, what I really wanted was a far larger change, to focus on musical theater and the Great American Songbook. That’s the music my voice was built to sing.” She pauses. “I did enjoy opera, I learned how to do it, many times I think I did it pretty successfully, but I had to acquire that ability.
“When I sing musical theater I feel like I’m in my own vocal skin.” The momentousness of this decision is clear by the way her voice is starting to quaver. She even admits to having a tear in her eye, a confession that could sound overemotional from many. But McNair is highly emotional about this. It is becoming clear that what she sings and how she sings it is not merely an important part of her life; it is the central thing in it. Compass-like, it guides her course. “The spiritual strength that you feel when you stop doing what everybody else tells you you should do and start doing what your heart tells you to do and you know you’re best-suited for brings such an honesty and authenticity to the work,” she continues. “It brings a level of enthusiasm and commitment like I have never known.” Then a laugh. “Mind you, for most of the performances I do now compared to the old days an entire digit has fallen off my fees! But it 
doesn’t matter.”
Sylvia in SongSpiel, 2009.
She sees the call of musical theater as destiny. And there had been signs. A mooted, though ultimately abandoned, recording of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Phantom of the Opera (opposite Placido Domingo, no less, for Deutsche Grammophon). A close working relationship with Andre Previn—“an artist who has lived in so many musical worlds, a crossover great in the best sense.” Above all, two early years of study with Eileen Farrell, whom McNair calls “an amazing hybrid soprano.” The kind of singer who could do a Wagner role at the Met on Thursday and on Saturday do a jazz set at a club right across the street from the opera house.” Tellingly, she points out, one of Farrell’s records was called I’ve Got a Right to Sing the Blues, and she was quite happy to teach her promising students pop and jazz rather than classical. So what, apart from determination did Farrell impart? “Be real, she was one of the most honest people I ever knew and she didn’t mind bucking the system when she believed in something.”
In 2007 Sylvia portrayed Rosabella in Ravinia's production of Frank Loesser's 'The Most Happy Fella.'
Yet how easy is it, I wonder, to be “real”—vocally speaking—today? So many singers sound like each other, or like singers on recordings they hold up as the ideal, with the result that individuality is a rare commodity. That’s bad enough in opera (but there at least the tide may be turning with the emergence of singers such as the tenors Joseph Calleia and Jonas Kaufmann, each of whom in his own way has a thoroughly unusual sound and vocal production). In musical theater it’s far worse. I could, I say, actually do an impression of “the Sondheim sound,” a catch-all singing style (think slightly strangled notes blandly held, until the vibrato is sent crashing in for over-egged effect some seconds later—that’s just for starters). She knows what I mean. I spare her the impression.
“Singers want to work,” she sighs. “They see what gets cast and think, ‘If I can only sound like that.’ And so they try to copy the most popular singers, like Kristin Chenoweth and Audra McDonald, or in opera Cecilia Bartoli, when they should be trying to be unique. I have a favorite phrase: the vocal fingerprint. Every voice should sound like one of a kind, as unique as a fingerprint. If you’re listening to an orchestra on the radio, or a cellist or a pianist, can you immediately tell who’s playing? The musicians would like you to be able to, and singers have opportunities that instrumentalists don’t have.”
Sylvia's debut as Tytania in Britten's 'A Midsummer Night's Dream' at the San Francisco Opera in 1992.
A moment, then a confession: “My first two or three years of studying singing, in my early 20’s, I listened to every recording that Elly Ameling ever made. I did my best to bring her purity of sound, her musical discipline, her care for the text into my singing. So we all fall prey to wanting to copy the great ones, especially when we’re young.” But the truly great ones, I rejoin, learn from their heroes and then find their own voices. “From your mouth to God’s ear!” she laughs. “But over the course of a life’s journey and a singing career, you not only find your own voice; you live enough life to actually have things to say about and through the music. I’ve said before that I could not have done a one-woman cabaret show 25 years ago. I didn’t have enough to say.” While we’re talking sound and interpretation, I observe that it seems to me in some ways McNair’s own sound has always been ideally suited to musical theater, retaining as it does the hallmarks of her normal speaking voice, all the way up to the top of the range. So it’s rooted in a very human scale. Actually, it shares quite a few qualities with that great lady of the Broadway stage, Barbara Cook—who happens to be a huge opera fan. McNair laughs slightly mischievously. “I know, she’s such an operaphile that she gets flustered when I’m in the audience! But I would love to walk in her shoes.”
Although describing herself as “the worst person to speak objectively about my voice,” she’s pleased with my definition. “I approach musical theater more as speaking on pitch than singing. When opera singers think about singing usually they tend to overblow, overproduce and over-en
unciate because that’s what’s required on the operatic stage. You have to—all that enormous space with no amplification and sometimes a terrible acoustic. So you have to enunciate to extreme degrees, support from your toes and so on. In musicals it’s the opposite. You have to relax the diction, the production, to make it as natural as possible and as close to speaking pitches as you can.” Keeping things close to speech, isn’t that simply about communication? And isn’t that what Gershwin (whose music will comprise the Gala Benefit Concert of July 23) for one was all about, communication whatever the form? And is that why he was in fact able to create things that lived between styles, or inhabited several at once? She offers a famous Gershwin story by way of an answer: “A singer came to his apartment for a coaching session and, when asked whether she had had a singing lesson, apologetically replied, ‘No I haven’t.’ ‘Good, don’t!’ replied Gershwin, pounding his fist on the piano. And I think what he meant by that was, “Don’t let a teacher make you into a cookie-cutter singer.” And that’s also true for Leonard Bernstein, who invited me to work with him and whose music I sing a lot. He didn’t write music just so the voice would sound good. He set texts, stories that fascinated him. His songs are hard to sing, and though they always serve the voice, they always serve the story. Same with Sondheim—it’s not for weak musicians. Sondheim is probably a words-first, vocalism-second songwriter.”
As her website suggests, she has thought about music and its meaning a great deal. Did music help her through her illness? “Three things pulled me through a death sentence—and it was a death sentence; I was given six months to live five years ago next month—my music, my friends, and my faith.” An orthodox faith? Christianity, for instance? She struggles slightly. “I don’t really know how to define it. I pray a lot.” The reason I asked her faith, I explain, is because ideas of music and faith are often bound up together. Many great composers wrote for religious settings, while for some secular music lovers music actually takes the place of faith. Does she believe in music as a religious miracle in itself? “My best prayers are voiced through song. It doesn’t have to be sacred music. Anything well done, anything, but certainly music or song, is in itself a form of worship.” Clearly religion hasn’t the same history of faith and music in musical theater, but does it play a role? Her reply is fascinating. “I wouldn’t presume to know what composers were thinking while creating. But by way of example, in 2007 I was part of a Ravinia-staged production of Frank Loesser’s The Most Happy Fella. As George Hearn and Rod Gilfry and I worked our way through the rehearsal period and performances, we came to see that the story is truly about redemption, and if you’re going to talk about religion at its best, redemption is one of its overriding qualities.” It is also present in one form or another in almost every great musical I can call to mind. “Music is a universal language, it touches us all, it fastens people’s hearts.”
McNair sounds so thrilled to have a future, especially this future, that she’s remarkably relaxed about the roles yet to come. At the moment there’s a one-off (she insists) return to opera, albeit in a mostly speaking role in Donizetti’s La bile du regiment for Opera Theatre of Saint Louis. After that? “There’s a list! I’d love to do Anna in The King and I. I was invited to but had to cancel for chemo and surgery. A production of Sondheim’s Passion is being batted around. Somebody just offered me Marian in The Music Man, which I’m a little old to do in a small theater, but I love those songs. We’ll see.”
She is delighted to hear that I recently joined the cast of a London musical for a night, to give myself (as a music writer) a better sense of what it means, and takes, to be a performer. The first thing I learned, I say, is that you can’t hear yourself sing. She shrieks with laughter, “That’s absolutely right! You can’t hear yourself and have no idea what’s coming out of your mouth, and you just try to survive!” Survival is a topic Sylvia McNair knows all too much about. But there’s surviving, and there’s living. She’s doing the latter.
Source: Ravinia Magazine July 2011. Writer: James Inverne, editor of Gramophone magazine and author of The Faber Pocket Guide to Musicals.
Sylvia is the featured artist for Cabaret Scenes May 2011 issue. View the pdf version of the entire article.
The article below was written by Fran Quigley, He is such a good writer. I fell IN LOVE with the GIRLS at the St. Aloysius school!
Of course, 3 weeks have now passed since I visited St. Aloysius in Nairobi and I have seen, heard, felt and smelled SO much more poverty, deadly disease, sadness and loss. But the PEOPLE are SO WONDERFUL!
Today I am singing a concert in the open-air courtyard at the AMPATH Center. I will do 14 pieces including 2 new-to-me KENYAN songs which I have fallen in love with! I have 2 pianists AND I’m also using a drummer to play the traditional African drum (the “ngoma”).
The entire concert will be video-ed and I hope we can get it on my website quickly.
Learn, love, and serve in Kenya
Indy Star, Fran Quigley
August 9, 2010
NAIROBI, Kenya — Six days a week, well before dawn, 17-year-old Esnas leaves the one-room shack she shares with six other people in the slum of Kibera and begins her walk to St. Aloysius Gonzaga Secondary School. By 6 a.m., she has spread out her books in an empty classroom and resumes the pursuit of her dream to become a physician.
Father Terry Charlton, the Indianapolis native and Brebeuf Jesuit Preparatory School graduate who worked with the Christian Life Community here to create St. Aloysius six years ago, explains that Esnas and her 280 fellow students have all lost parents to AIDS. They live in impoverished Kibera, Africa’s largest slum, where most residents have neither running water nor electricity.
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Schooling past primary grades is not publicly supported in Kenya, and these students from poor families have no chance of paying for high school. “If I was not in school, my family would expect me to marry by age 15,” says one of Esnas’ female classmates.
St. Aloysius is unique among Kenyan schools in that it is not only free of charge but also committed to supporting college or university fees for its students.
The long-term commitment to the students is matched by acknowledgement of day-to-day realities here, as the breakfast and lunch served at school six days a week are sometimes the only meals the children will get. “For many of our students, the lack of food at home makes Sunday the worst day of the week,” Charlton says.
The schooling and the meals, as well as the new building St. Aloysius students proudly occupy after inhabiting cramped quarters until two months ago, all cost money. The white-bearded Charlton projects the demeanor of the Jesuit scholar-priest, which is accurate enough, but he is also a tireless fundraiser, making annual visits to the U.S. every year to share the stories of successes and challenges in one of the world’s most desperate places.
For the students here, the first challenge is to navigate the rigorous Kenyan secondary curriculum, which includes four years of mathematics and two science courses each year, culminating with a make-or-break month-long exam before graduation.
But St. Aloysius’ teachers and staff make it clear to the students that their challenge does not end when they leave the classroom. Painted on the walls — and graffiti-ed on at least on classroom desktop I saw — is the school’s motto, “Learn, Love, and Serve.”
It has taken root: One of St. Aloysius’ first graduates has already created an ambitious organization to serve poor children, and other young alumni are devoting time and resources to help kids escape the same desperate poverty they once knew themselves.
Esnas too has taken the maxim to heart. “The generous people of the U.S. who have helped us should know we are working very hard on our studies now. But we will be sure to help others in the future as well.
“After learning and loving, it will be time to serve, and we will go back and help our community.”
Published: Sunday, July 11, 2010, 5:48 PM
James McQuillen, Special to The Oregonia
It’s Saturday night and Sylvia McNair is radiant, almost literally. She’s not exactly giving off her own light, but she’s reflecting what light there is in the dimmed room. Her necklaces, earrings, bracelets and eyelids sparkle; her short platinum hair and iridescent, silvery pants shine.
More to the point, she’s beaming, and the sense of ease and energy she radiates is the essence of her one-woman cabaret show “Subject to Change!” Read More
AFRICA! Part-humanitarian, part-exploration, part-being in love with Indiana University, Sylvia will spend time volunteering at the IU Med Center in Kenya this summer. This 22-year-old medical program has been nominated twice for the Nobel prize and it is doing miraculous work with victims of HIV/Aids, cancer, and a host of other medical issues. Sylvia will share her gift of music with the orphaned and vulnerable children who reside at the Med Center.
April 23, 2010
Click here to visit the IU Hoosers website for more photos.
BLOOMINGTON, Ind. – Indiana University First Lady Laurie Burns McRobbie and the WonderLab Wonder Women topped the Indiana women’s basketball assistant coaches, 63-55, on Friday, April 23 in Assembly Hall.
The WonderLab Wonder Women roster, which also included IU head coach Felisha Legette-Jack, Darby McCarty, Sylvia McNair, Sarah Beggs, Alisa Sutor, Melanie Hart, Kelly King and Mary Kelley, jumped to an early lead in the first half and took a 21-point lead into halftime. The IU team included assistant coaches Amaka Agugua and Jose Mori, video coordinator Scott Dorrell, graduate assistant Evan Suttner, student assistant Whitney Thomas and assistant strength and condition coach Tom Morris.
However, the IU squad fought back in the second half, cutting the lead to five, but the WonderLab Wonder Women held on for the 63-55 win.
Melanie Hart led the Wonder Women with 12 points, while Kelly King scored 10 points and First Lady McRobbie scored nine points. For the IU team, Jose Mori led all players with 26 points, while Amaka Agugua and Evan Suttner each netted 10 points apiece.
The game consisted of two 15-minute halves with a halftime speech from IU head men’s basketball coach Tom Crean and a performance by the first and second grade classes from the Bloomington’s Prep School Academy. First Lady McRobbie won the chance to play against the IU coaches at the WonderLab Science Night Out benefit auction for Bloomington’s WonderLab, the Museum of Science, Health and Technology. WonderLab is ranked among the top-25 science museums in the country.
Web-only review: Songspiel at Georgetown.
Since I’ve talked about opera companies doing less with more, it would be ungallant of me not to praise American Opera Theater, which certainly keeps an adventurous spirit and an eye on the drama of opera. Its latest production, “Songspiel” (which came to Georgetown this past weekend) even featured a genuine diva, Sylvia McNair, a multiple Grammy Award winner and former Met diva who gamely explored her less glamorous side playing a homeless street person with a cabaret singer’s pipes. Read More
by Bruce-Michael Gelbert: OnStage.com, November 20, 2009
Music by “Great American Songwriting Teams” was the focus of the New York Festival of Song (NYFOS) November program, which I heard on the 19th, at its third and final outing, with NYFOS’ invaluable Artistic Director, Co-founder, pianist and arranger Steven Blier guiding Jason Graae, Sylvia McNair and Mary Testa, a winning trio of singers, at Merkin Concert Hall. Blier and Graae opened the proceedings with a most optimist number, Buddy DeSylva, Lew Brown, and Ray Henderson’s “Lucky Day,” from “George White’s Scandals of 1926.” Read More
Sylvia McNair: Grammy Award-Winning Songstress and Breast Cancer Survivor.
Two-time Grammy Award winner Sylvia McNair lays claim to a remarkable 25-year career in the musical realms of opera, oratorio, cabaret, and musical theater. Since 1982, Sylvia has performed with almost every major American and European orchestra and opera company, including the Metropolitan Opera, Chicago Lyric Opera, the Salzburg Festival, and the New York Philharmonic. She has sung for U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, presented a recital at the U.S. Supreme Court by special invitation from Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, and once performed with the Vienna Philharmonic for Pope John Paul II at the Vatican.
A renowned vocalist with over 70 recordings and worldwide accolades, Sylvia values one particular success above the rest – defeating cancer. She was diagnosed with stage III breast cancer in 2006, less than six months after obtaining a clear mammogram. During that year, the year “when this huge brick wall came crashing down on my head,” she tells Coping magazine, Sylvia endured months of chemotherapy and radiation, underwent surgery to remove her left breast, and persevered through four other major surgeries related to her cancer. And if that weren’t enough, Sylvia was just coming out of a painful divorce, ending her nearly 20-year marriage.
“It’s so easy to start blaming yourself for ‘failures,’” Sylvia says. “I certainly did. Failed marriage, failed career (she had to cancel several months of performances due to her medical treatments), failed health. Every direction I turned, I was being hit with failure.
“The one thing that always gave me a little relief,” she says, “was reading about or hearing other people, especially people with cancer, talk about their ‘failures’ as well.”
“My body is forever altered. But so is my spirit.”
Now, three years on the other side of that “failure” called cancer, Sylvia views it more as a gift than a setback. “Cancer is one of the best things that’s ever happened to me,” she says earnestly, before adding with defiant laughter, “And you can put that in bold print!”
“Cancer is a perspective giver like nothing else I’ve ever experienced. It has given me so much more than it has taken away. And it has taken away a lot,” she continues. “My body is forever altered. But so is my spirit,” Sylvia says, her voice now projecting an air of hopefulness, “and my spirit is now living with much more clarity and gratitude. I’m living larger than I have ever lived, and I live every single day of my life in such a way that if it happens to be my last day on earth, I’ll be contented with it. Cancer has given me that gift.”
Unfortunately, cancer was not so benevolent toward her professional life. When it came to her singing career, Sylvia says cancer “was a killer.” She confides, “Having to cancel many months of work was not only financially devastating, but it was professionally devastating as well. I had to drop off the scene, and I’m in a business where it’s hard enough to be employed under the best of circumstances. It was terrifying.”
But don’t be so quick to count Sylvia out. “I am definitely back in the saddle, better and stronger than ever,” she says. “The summer of 2009 was the summer of my dreams.” She sang the lead in two musical theater productions, Camelot and A Little Night Music. This is a welcome change from her musical roots in opera, a career transition that Sylvia admits was purely pleasure driven.
After being given what she feels is a second chance at life, Sylvia now grabs every opportunity that comes her way and never fails to appreciate the gift that she has been given: “Singing music I love, working with people I love in places I love – life doesn’t get any better than this!”
This article was originally published in Coping® with Cancer magazine and written by Laura Shipp.
