My impression of it is it was something that people in New York city did, and I'm not the kind of guy that would normally go to an opera, I'm not the kind of guy that's very familiar with Opera.

Darn sure enjoyed this one.

It's funny, you know, this piece is a musical comedy.

When people think opera, it's probably not what they're thinking of.

It's very, very, very exciting to just do something different and unique and be outside and just have a lot of fun on stage.

It's so wonderful a concept that Ryan and Nick had to do this kind of story in this setting.

It's, it's magical.

Wonderful.

This story, I think, is something that anybody can relate to, two women in love with the same man.

You've got two guys haggling over money, and two strangers coming from out of town, wondering how they'll be received by the locals.

Even if you've never seen an opera before, or if you don't know what Baroque music is I think you'll enjoy this opera because music is fun, the cast is amazing and it's set in the middle of a beautiful field in the actual place that we're talking about in the opera.

-singing- I do French music And I do ranching and I, and you know, how the hell do these two things go together?

I run this group called Opera Lafayette.

Opera Lafayette specializes in 17th, 18th and 19th century but particularly 18th century opera.

Opera Lafayette is to my mind a distinctly unique organization and that we are working to rediscover these beautiful little historical works that have mainly been forgotten by audiences today and surely neglected.

And most of what do has not been staged in a century, Ryan, I think has a really unique vision and is assembling teams that can make those works understandable and relevant to audiences today.

I don't see a lot of companies doing that.

With Opera Lafayette you have the perfect combination of doing an old work, something in the classical form and yet at the same time, you're doing a world premiere because these pieces haven't been heard for many years and we're always doing something new and interesting.

What opera Lafayette is doing is they're taking an old work, updating it and giving it a little 19th century boost a little bit of the wild west.

-singing- There seems to be a lot of mistrust in our world today I think that with a work like this, that's lighthearted and inclusive people can come together and find that there's some common ground there where they might not have thought there was common ground.

When I was growing up and coming to Mancos as a kid, it was really mostly a ranching community, but there's a new population here.

And so even here in the Mancos valley, you've got these different populations of people who have been raised in a rural area and people who come from a more suburban or urban area and are attracted to this area.

I thought that the project would be really interesting from the point of view of bringing together rural, urban population.

Therefore, we're going to do it first here, in this Mancos opera house and take it to Washington, New York immediately afterwards.

The building is known as the Mancos Opera house because out west, anything that had a stage and an auditorium got called the opera house.

But to our knowledge the Mancos Opera House never had an opera performed in it.

And so here comes Ryan Brown and he says, I would like to produce an opera and stage it and perform it in the Mancos opera house.

We created this production to be indoors here at this Mancos opera house, this wonderful asset to the community, which is under renovation, which was wonderful couple Phillip and Linda Walters have made their baby sprucing it up and making it a place which will be available for the whole community to do things just like this.

And so we were all set to do it in early May here in the opera house.

And then COVID hit, I said, well, what about if we do it outdoors?

And we can do it outside, but we'd rehearse it here in the opera house.

And to hear the voices wafting out of the windows of the opera house, it lit up the whole town.

The strangest thing about here it's first, it's so super small village.

So it's very unusual to do an opera production in a very small place like here.

And plus now during this pandemic, so it's so unexpected.

I think the fact that we're in this small town in Southwest Colorado makes it possible for us to do this at this time, because it's a small town.

And because it's few people it's, it's possible.

It's kind of the perfect play to do here because I think people around here will be, will enjoy it a lot to, to see the opera cowboy.

The location of the opera is actually one of the coolest things about this project, because we're doing the opera the location that it's set and all these characters are in their own environments.

So you're transported back to wild west.

It's really important because Mancos is well-known for being a little bit wild.

I wish that more operas and more opera companies would do something like this, you know, taking stories to their actual locations and performing them there.

I think it's, it's only good to bring classical music and opera in unusual places.

So I'm very glad that we brought opera to Mancos for the first time.

-singing- The setting that we have for this opera, you can't imagine being better.

First of all, the backdrop of the barn, the trailers on which the stage is going to be set up, the physical props, the set pieces that we've been working with in the opera house, all that stuff is so evocative and so immediate.

I've never done an outdoor opera before, um, and getting to perform in a kind of out in the country, outside the barn with beautiful mountains, you know, all around us is, is quite something and really gives you, uh, a natural set.

We don't even need sets to be built because they have been so gloriously set for us.

Everything is so beautiful and everything is so uncommon.

The place where we will do the show in front of, in the old barn, in a field there's cow in front of us, when we sing, there's horses on the side of it.

So it's kind of very, very, an amazing experience to be here.

What a very appropriate place to do this opera on a barn with a whole bunch of cows, all around us having live animals.

It's like, we're really here.

Performing outside at any time or in a semi outdoor setting is carries its own set of challenges with it.

But it's a very Baroque thing to do.

Everything was still getting put together as far as construction of the stage on top of the two trailers.

And I remember standing there and looking at it and going okay.

Yeah, sure.

And somebody else had mentioned like, oh my gosh, this is, is so weird.

And you know, there's a, there's, there's hole here in the trailer and don't step on that plank because it pops up and it's so dusty out here.

And I remember thinking, jeez, I maybe I'm playing all the wrong venues, cause this is like half the stuff that I play.

I'm doing it wrong.

Bringing opera to life is a difficult task in the best of worlds.

Right now in the age of COVID, every task we do is five times harder.

Getting singers in a room together requires quarantining and testing.

Are we going to wear masks?

Are we not going to wear masks?

At some point to sing they have to come off anyway.

Now there's, you know, how close can we be?

Do we need to sanitize the tools between use, how do we load a truck?

How do we build a stage?

How do we deal with props?

Do, do we sanitize them between each performer touching them?

What do we do about costumes?

There's just a world of things that don't present themselves right away.

Each one of us has made sacrifices.

And you know two weeks we were self isolating and the community has made it possible, and the wonderful team at Opera Lafayette has made it possible through, you know, a lot of work and stringent protocols.

Everyone is kinda just trying their best, but figuring out what the safest way to put on a production and proceed with life.

It's an unusual time.

It's a brave new world.

One of the things we, my opera group Opera Lafayette has tried to do is to recapture the origins and the original spirit of things.

So, and I think that the original spirit of these comic operas in the Parisian fairs was one of participation and was one of the vernacular.

And so it didn't make sense to try to do it in French.

We wanted to try to see allright, what happens when we put it into English and put it into the vernacular and get people involved in the audience and can we recreate the spirit of the original?

I was given an 18th century French script.

And I had to somehow make it sound like 1890s, Colorado.

So I had a lot of fun writing it.

The dialogue was the easy and definitely the fun part.

I just had to hit the same plot points from the original, but I could let my imagination run wild.

The tougher part was translating the lyrics, because I had to maintain the rhythm and the rhyme scheme of the original.

And French and English have very, very different natural rhythms.

But I found in an odd way that cowboy English actually helped me there.

-singing- There were some locals who commented on some of the things that were said, the way things were said and how realistic it was for the times.

The blacksmith is kind of a pivotal piece in the history of comic French opera.

It was at a time when people were getting sick of stories about gods and famous people and historical characters.

They wanted something they could relate to.

They'd start with songs that everybody knew.

They put new words to them to tell the story that they wanted to tell, but that way people could sing along if they dropped a sign with the words.

Ryan and Nick put folk songs in between where there were ordinarily French folk songs.

And so I was relieved to see that I knew the majority of those coming in: Shenandoah, Red River Valley, Darling Corey.

And then they would always end it with this vaudeville chorus.

The whole chorus would sing and try to get the audience to sing and to have them participate in some way.

Come on, help me out here.

I think if you knew this music already this Philidor, and you heard us playing it, you would instantly recognize it.

We're making some changes to give it sort of a cowboy texture.

Philidor is a really interesting composer in the 18th century.

He would go from, you know, the highest echelon of society and the most sophisticated kind of contrapuntal music and start writing tunes that were really easy on the ear, easy to comprehend right away.

Then combine that with some of the learned music that he knew.

-singing- And Ryan's idea was to take this French Baroque opera and can we just play it rather than using a lute and a harpsichord and a theorbo can we do it like cowboy style with an acoustic guitar and a stand up bass?

And the answer is, yes, it's not easy, but it's totally possible.

I wasn't really sure that I could take an orchestral score from 1761 and make it work with guitar, violin and bass.

The key person really is the guitarist because he's got to fill in the harmony and then turn it into a style that works for the West.

And so we were really lucky to find Adam Guardino is a two time national finger-picking champion and he was really game for this.

When I started working on it, I thought this isn't gonna work.

How is, how is this supposed to work?

But in going through it and even hearing some of the harmonies and some of the melodies and how they kind of work together is actually very reminiscent of, of, of some of those older cowboy tunes.

Bringing me in, I've not played opera before playing cowboy music is what I specialize in.

And he said, use that, use that.

So I say, okay, sure.

I mean, you asked for it.

So here it comes.

The score is what they call a skeleton and they have, they have the melody line over the top and they have the bass part underneath.

And then, um, the part for the singers is always written out.

That's it, there's nothing else for, for anybody else trying to jump in and join them.

Philidor was a great composer.

And he likes to pack in really interesting chord changes and surprise the listener.

And that's, what's so delightful about his music.

It means there's a lot of little corners that needed figuring out.

And so when I arrived, they had already done so much work and I just got into those squirrely bits.

We really tried a bunch of this because the changes are so sophisticated and so beautiful, and not at all obvious.

With the opportunity to insert American folk songs, our community musicians, join the professional musicians and play as well in the performances.

My name is Andrew Saletta and I was asked to be in charge of getting the community ensemble together for the opera.

It was really exciting to work with them.

We had such a diverse group of people.

They all have folk music backgrounds, so it was right up their alley.

Andrew Saletta and Ryan Brown were doing sort of a preview for the Blacksmith opera, and it had a sign up sheet for any community musicians interested.

I said sure I'll sign up, it sounds cool.

Ryan knew that I played guitar and did a little singing.

And then I was just included in one of local musicians.

So I felt really privileged to be included.

There's something that was really important to have in this time of COVID and everything that's going on in 2020, it's kind of nice to have something light hearted, but meaningful that brought people together.

That was kind of the highlight for me, was getting together with all these community musicians and a lot of people that I admire going in knowing that we're working on all these tunes for an opera and seeing how, how it all came together.

And I just couldn't have been more impressed with just the, the level of performers, it was really cool to see.

I'm the local music teacher here at the Mancos school district.

I also got to have my students be involved with the project on a couple of songs.

It was just a really exciting process to have them all involved and have them see the professional opera company, and just experience it all.

We are a very small town, and things like that don't usually just plop into the lap of a small town.

We started out with a very small group and then it enlarged as more people knew about it.

When I first found out about performing with the opera, I was super hyped when I was not playing my music I was totally glued onto the opera and it was so much fun.

I delve into the project and started off with asking the kids, but they thought opera was, and it was just hilarious to see all their same, the same reactions.

It really just goes to like aaahhh!

Just, that's all they know about opera.

I hope it changed their perceptions of it and that they developed more of an appreciation of it.

It wasn't what I thought at first at all.

Yeah.

I used to think it was like aaahh!

ahhh!

For the kids' performance, we have a class of children and we had it rehearsed with them and sort of an exchange.

We were on the other side of the street, they were, everybody was masked and they had a lot of questions about our life, our travels, uh, what's our favorite opera.

How many states we'd been to?

You know, they were very curious.

Kids got to ask them questions and it was really neat to see the kids just ask random questions.

Do you fish?

It's really exciting hearing their parents talk about it afterwards.

The kids telling their parents how much fun they had.

It's certainly a strange time to have a live performance career.

And the fact that opera Lafayette and some other companies are making it work is really awesome to see.

The piece will definitely take on a new life when we bring it to New York or DC.

Back east in Washington or New York, it'll be more comfortable that might show itself on stage.

Great thing about having the opportunity to perform this opera here in Mancos Colorado.

And then again in DC is Mancos will give the performers and the production staff, a great jumping off point to take the earthiness of this production back to DC and back to New York and help them find the real joy and real fun in this work.

I believe now with this authentic feel of what it's like to be in cowboy land, now we know what it's really like to be out in the countryside, out in the open.

And then we can now translate that onto a stage in New York and in DC.

And we can get that authentic feel because we've been there.

We've done that.

It's just really, really unique to start here because it gives us so much insight on what these characters actually are going through.

People who live on the countryside, people who are blacksmithing and taking care of horses and animals.

we're right here in the middle of it.

I find this project so personal and unique and specific to the community that is here.

I mean, it was created for this community.

And I just, I love the concept that Ryan has of wanting to bring people together that may distrust or have prejudices against each other and bring them under one roof and come to enjoy this story because it's for all of them.

And it's just, I think it's a wonderful, wonderful, specific, beautiful thing.

The performances will just be rollicking good times.

You know, the story, it really is funny.

It touches on a lot of contemporary issues.

So I hope that the experience for the audience is just, that was a great time.

I didn't know opera was so much fun.

Or, I knew opera was this much fun and I wasn't disappointed.

It's a Baroque opera fixin' for a good time.

I can't believe you could grow a mustache that big and thick and luxurious, wait, did he like put gel in it to like make sure it stayed?

That moustache was beautiful.

You know, it was big, he had long hair.

He looked like a cartoon character!

And then my friends made fun of me.

Cause I thought he was cute.