Les Troyens

Forty years ago, with the best crew in the world, we did this opera In Boston. Berlioz. The Met is doing it currently, and several people email that they're listening and remembering. Esquire Jauchem was supplying us with state stamped Lebanese hash and we were pulling off the impossible. The opera had never been done in this country precisely because it was impossible. It's two operas, actually, the destruction of Troy, then Dido in Carthage. I have a pirated recording I play once in a while. I was on stage, in a little skirt and a short sword, so I could help destroy Troy. If you've never been involved with something like this, you can't imagine what it's like backstage. Chaos at a level several steps beyond anything you've ever experienced. It was the "T" year, we did "Tosca", Beverly Sills' last "Traviata", and "Les Troyens". Several of the crew went starkers, we just slept in the aisles of the theater. The Orpheum, backed up to the Combat Zone. We used to slip out the back door and go to a bar where we could get a sardine sandwich and a ten ounce draft for a buck. I still make those sandwiches. A flat tin of sardines in oil, dumped on a piece of bread, with a slice of onion. It's very good, though you need to keep some mints around. The crew was fantastic, we'd worked with the scenic designers for years and we'd built these huge sets in forced perspective. I rode in the Trojan Horse, riding with eight or nine kids dressed as adults, that spilled out of the horse upstage, replaced by members of the chorus as they moved downstage. It was right at the edge of believability, the whole experience. Most of us retired to the Cape, afterwards, and didn't speak for several months. Catatonic. We'd walk on the winter beach and hum a few bars, acknowledge each other with a wave of the hand, but we had been moved by the experience and it was hard to face ourselves directly. The myriad failures. What I mean.