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(From The Spearhead Summer 1997)
I remember Katherine very well from the 1965 production of Werther, when I had to stand near the top of an eight foot high ladder, behind a scrim pretending to be giving a sermon in church. There, directly in front of me in the wings was Katherine leading a chorus of other Supers and having a great old time mimicking all of my gestures and making faces. Katherine became a Super when she and Susan Anderson were taking ballet class with Marika Sakellariou at the College of Marin. Marika who was the Opera’s Ballet Mistress at the time, suggested that they should contact the Super Department (Karl Ratzner) and Katherine was immediately cast in the 1981 Ponnelle production of Rigoletto; in the first act orgy scene with the men’s chorus. It has been a party ever since. Katherine has not kept an account of all the operas she has been in since then, but believes it has averaged almost two a year.
Her most interesting role to date was the 1983 Das Rheingold, where she was the only Super cast with ballet dancers, as the non-singing Rhine Maidens. They had to lie prone on the floor in the heavy fog produced by the stage dry ice. The smoke was so overpowering that before they could ‘pop up’ and do their number, they had to take oxygen from little red tanks taped to the back of the rocks. It was also in Das Rheingold that she first talked to her husband, Joseph, into his first and only appearance as a San Francisco Opera Super, as one of the giants. While carrying his load of gold down the steps to the understage, he fell in the dark and broke his arm. He lay there for some while before someone came and helped him to the dressing room. When Katherine arrived, she found them removing the costume and Jenny Green hovering around admonishing “cut on the seams.”
Returning to the Werther performances, she also remembers standing in the wings chatting with other Supers when Renata Scotto would pass by reeking of so much garlic it would nearly knock you out. She was on her way to the stage to do an “up close and personal” duet with Alfredo Kraus. Poor Mr. Kraus.
The next most interesting role was perhaps the Elektra of 1991 with the wonderful Gwyneth Jones, where she was one of the slave women and Rex and the make-up department spent hours covering her in her gunnysack costume with eight different kinds of mud. And with blackened teeth, too! Her reward was being one of the first out for bows, and though not actually supposed to bow, they did one night, and got a round of applause.
All this from the young lady who grew up and went to school in Oklahoma, majoring in theater arts before moving to the Bay Area in 1975, where she met and married her husband in 1979. She loves to super because of her background in the theater and dance, and to be blunt about it, she’s just a ham! But there is also an important aspect to supering, and that is the friendships developed over the years. And sometimes it is hard for she misses all of the Supers who are no longer with us. Particularly missed is Elayne Ashman, for whom she subbed in Andrea Chenier.
Katherine is active with the First Methodist Church of San Rafael and has worked for Delta Airlines as a ticket agent for the past 25 years. Her very first opera was an Aida in the Baths of Caracalla in Rome, where she was truly impressed with the venue, the voices and the spectacle from the’500th’ row back. She is still waiting to be in her first production with elephants. But pachyderms aside, perhaps appearing with Leontyne Price in her last Aida in 1984 will have to suffice.
This past season at the Civic Auditorium, Katherine had two roles which involved dancing. That’s why I like to call her the “Sylph of the Civic.” First came Lohengrin as part of the Bridal Procession (and other scenes). She says she really got into the emotions of the piece, and in one scene she was to stand in front of Karita Mattila as Elsa and to protect her from Ortrud. She was so into it, when she looked behind, Elsa had moved six to eight feet away.
Next came the Salome production, where almost blinded by heavy black veils, she had to perform intricate movements with three other dancing Supers, all the while making sure not to step on Karen Huffstodt’s costume. Lest it become the ‘Dance of the Six Veils.’ Both Karita and Karen were wonderful to work with, but Karen was a bit more friendly.
As you might have guessed by now, Katherine loves to dance, and she also supers with the San Francisco Ballet, having done two Nutcrackers and also with the visiting Kirov Ballet in Romeo and Juliet and The Sleeping Beauty. Ballet rehearsals are much more exciting than most opera rehearsals. In opera you walk on, stand and walk off, for what seems a hundred times, while in the ballet you get about 20 minutes of some rather complicated movements, sometimes in Russian, and then you’re on!
Katherine thinks she is fortunate that she is tall for she thinks this is helpful in getting roles when the director wants to make the soprano look smaller than she is (and we all know sopranos!) Every year Katherine’s mother asks her if she is playing nuns or whores that season. So far it’s been seven whores to one nun. She doesn’t mind, saying that even though the pay is the same, whores have much nicer costumes. Which brings us to another one of her favorite backstage stories, when in Les Dialogues des Carmelites, Regine Crespin was carried offstage in a heavy bed, they had to use male Supers as nuns. Backstage Mme. Crespin would go around looking under the wimple asking “are you my boy nun or my girl nun?”
Another story comes from Rigoletto where she had to wear a rubber nose, a very tall wig-hat combination glued to her forehead and about 40 pounds of costume, which cut her shoulders. She was sitting down backstage when Maestro Adler came by and said “You shouldn’t be sitting in your costume.” Katherine replied, “but it’s so hot and this is so heavy.” All the while Renee De Jarnatt and Carolyn Waugh, cowering beside her, were saying, “You don’t talk back to Mr. Adler!”
In the upcoming (1997) season she would like to be in the Rigoletto (with new costumes we hope) with Ruth Ann Swenson and in Tosca with Carol Vaness (going shoulder to shoulder?), two singers she admires very much. A few of the perks of being a Super she says are being able to listen to Placido Domingo in Herodiade (she was a harem woman with top on), watching the Merola people blossoming into stars, being in The Death of Klinghoffer and working with Mark Morris, and not only meeting and getting to know other Supers but also all of the wonderful people in the wigs and makeup departments, the dressers, and recently, the members of the chorus.
And finally, she would like to know why is it that her husband, who attends most of her performances, always has trouble trying to figure out which one she is on stage.
Tom Carlisle