Opera may seem highfalutin’, but it revels in outlandish behaviors and over-the-top plots.
And if it can accomodate boatloads of courtesans, why not Anna Nicole Smith? By the time she died in 2007, at age 39, she’d been a stripper, married an elderly billionaire, allegedly had sex both with her son’s female nanny and Zsa Zsa Gabor’s husband, and endured exploding nipples, vicious lawsuits and toxic drug cocktails.
“Most people live their life in threes and sevens, but she lived hers in ones and 10s,” says Richard Thomas, who wrote the libretto for “Anna Nicole,” which opens at BAM Tuesday in a co-production with City Opera. “If you’re going to explore fame and celebrity, she’s who you should do.”
Having co-authored 2003’s “Jerry Springer: The Opera,” Thomas is an old hand with those themes. But “Anna Nicole” — on which he collaborated with contemporary-opera composer Mark-Anthony Turnage — has a poignancy “Springer” lacked.
“Anna here is a single mom doing the best she can for her kid,” says Thomas, 48. “She’s smart, ambitious and funny, even if we don’t pull any punches with the bad side. It’s like a morality tale: Beware what you wish for.”
Sarah Joy Miller, the lithe 34-year-old soprano who plays the title part, concurs. “I have a lot of compassion for her as a person and the choices that she made, and certainly there were some bad ones. It’s easy to write her off as someone who didn’t have any character or whatever, but look at her upbringing and what she dealt with.”
Anna Nicole was a switch from Miller’s usual “La Traviata” and “Rigoletto” roles. Until now, the furthest afield she’d gotten was Baz Luhrmann’s “La Bohème,” in which she met her husband, David Miller, a member of Il Divo.
First, there was the research.
“I immersed myself in everything Anna Nicole,” the singer says. “Then I immersed myself in everything Marilyn — when you watch her, she’s often imitating what she thinks Marilyn would do.”
Then there were the custom-molded fake breasts.
“They’re not terribly heavy, but when you’re running around in 6-inch heels, singing at the same time, they become heavy,” Miller says. “I had to readjust how I ground myself.”
And in a rare move for opera, where performers often come with natural poundage, Miller puts on a fat suit in the last act. She explains, laughing, that this helped her stay in character: “She’s lost her son, there’s a feeling of being trapped and suffocated — and I feel like that physically!”
Almost as unusual is Turnage’s stylistically diverse score, which accommodates classical singers and Broadway pros like Mary Testa and James Barbour.
“When you’re using a lot of crude language, that’s perhaps more musical theater than opera,” says baritone Rod Gilfry, 54, who plays Anna Nicole’s lawyer, Howard K. Stern. “The more operatic moments in her part are used to express the hugeness of her personality.”
That at least is something everybody agrees on — and Anna Nicole introduced a new era when celebrity became a skill in itself.
“She was incredibly famous,” Thomas says, “and that has to be proof of some kind of talent.”