On a Saturday afternoon in mid-October, the Whipple Auditorium at the Cedar Rapids Public Library will fill with the sounds of a rainforest: a squawking parrot, a chorus of night creatures, and a hungry dog in the sky trying to swallow the moon. It is an opera, but not the kind that usually comes with velvet seats and a black-tie crowd. Papagayo, Cedar Rapids Opera's touring children's opera, is built for kids, and it is free.
The story comes from a picture book. Papagayo: The Mischief Maker was written and illustrated by Gerald McDermott. He built a career out of retelling folktales from around the world in bold, geometric picture books, most famously Anansi the Spider and Arrow to the Sun, which won the Caldecott Medal. Papagayo tells of a noisy parrot who spends his days playing in the jungle and disturbing the night animals with his raucous cries. When the ferocious moon dog appears and begins, bite by bite, to devour the moon, the terrified night creatures are helpless. Only Papagayo knows how to save it, and the night animals learn that the loud parrot is a good friend to have, even if he is a bit noisy.
The opera adaptation was written by Edward Barnes, who composed both the words and the music. Barnes is a Juilliard graduate and the winner of Guggenheim and NEA fellowships and the Stephen Sondheim Award for innovative musical theater. His producing credits include work on Broadway and at Carnegie Hall. Papagayo was commissioned by San Diego Opera, and it has since been staged by Cincinnati Opera, Tri-Cities Opera, and several universities. The piece runs about 30 minutes and calls for four singers, with a small ensemble, accompanied by piano or by a fully orchestrated recording. In Cedar Rapids, the company is using puppetry alongside the live voices.
The roles map neatly onto four voice types: Papagayo is a tenor, the Moon Dog a baritone, Monkey, Snake, and Butterfly are sung by a soprano, and Sloth and Frog by a mezzo-soprano. The themes the opera carries are the ones the book carried: that music and singing can save the day, and that the natural world is worth protecting.
What makes the Cedar Rapids performance unusual is who is singing it. The cast comes from Cedar Rapids Opera's Smith Young Artist Program, which places singers at the undergraduate, graduate, and postgraduate level with the company for a season. The program, supported by an endowed gift from John and Dyan Smith, gives stipends to emerging singers and puts them in professional situations: they understudy mainstage roles, sing comprimario parts and in the opera chorus, and perform the company's annual outreach operas for elementary students. The program has existed since 2003.
Cedar Rapids Opera itself presents two to three operas a season, and its stated mission is to advance opera as a living American art form while developing both the artists who make it and the audiences who support it. The children's opera is one of the ways it does the second half of that job.
Papagayo is the company's Season 29 touring production. It has already had one public outing this fall: a 4 p.m. show on Sunday, Oct. 11, at Centennial Park in North Liberty. That performance sold out, and according to the opera company, all 375 tickets were claimed within eight hours. The Cedar Rapids library show on Saturday, Oct. 17, at 3 p.m. works differently. There is no preregistration and no reserved seating, so families simply arrive before showtime and find a seat. The Whipple Auditorium is on the library's downtown branch at 450 Fifth Avenue SE.
A question-and-answer session generally follows the performance, giving kids a chance to ask how opera singing actually works and what it is like to perform. For a child who has never seen an opera, that may be the most valuable part: a chance to see that the people making these big sounds are ordinary young singers, still in school or just starting out, standing a few feet away in a public library.
The show is aimed at young audiences, but the company makes no secret of the fact that it is built to work on adults too. It is a half hour of live music, handmade puppets, and a story about a loud bird who turns out to be exactly the friend the forest needed. The library asks only that families arrive early enough to get a seat.