Musical Education Exercises Its Voice

When Opera Pacific, the county’s only professional opera company, shut down its education department in budget cutbacks two years ago, Ann Noriel and Steve Parkin lost their jobs. But they knew what to do to make sure kids still got to experience opera.

They formed their own troupe, Southland Opera.

The company takes fully staged and costumed performances of short operas and streamlined Broadway musicals to classrooms in Orange and Los Angeles counties, as well as Ventura, Riverside and San Bernardino.

They’ve reached about 214,000 kids by giving 750 performances mostly in elementary and middle schools.

“There is a lot of need, and I don’t want to ever stop,” Noriel said. “It’s so important.”

Their next performance is designed for children and adults.

They will stage Gian Carlo Menotti’s Christmas opera, “Amahl and the Night Visitors,” about a boy miraculously cured when he offers his humble crutch to the Wise Men as a gift to the baby Jesus, Sunday through Tuesday in Founders Hall at the Orange County Performing Arts Center in Costa Mesa.

The company--which is based in Monrovia and maintains a core of 12 singers--operates on an annual budget of about $420,000. Three-quarters of that comes from ticket sales and program fees charged to PTAs and school districts; the rest from grants, donations and corporate gifts.

“If someone wants to give us money, we’ll take it and use it well,” Noriel says.

Though losing their jobs was a shock, it was also a chance.

“Ann and I said, ‘This is our window of opportunity. This is what we want to do. We’re ready for it.’ I knew we’d do very well,” Parkin says.

They were helped by Irvine-based Opera Pacific, which mounts four productions a year at the Orange County Performing Arts Center in Costa Mesa.

“They gave us quite a lot of sets and props,” Noriel says. “Steve and I took one of their shows, ‘The Night Harry Stopped Smoking,’ and we just went and sought out contracts. We contracted with tons of schools that first season.

“In our first year, we did 282 performances. We did that one show, and we costumed a new show, ‘Stories Come Alive,’ as well as ‘Amahl,’ a reduced ‘Carousel,’ a reduced ‘Cosi,’ and three different concerts.”

“The kids are just enthralled,” says office manager Marcia Gray. “They are so involved in the whole thing.”

Noriel is a lyric soprano but mostly serves on the business side as general director of Southland Opera. Originally from the San Francisco Bay area, she went to Cal State Polytechnic University for a degree in vocal performance. To pay the bills, she also has run an insurance agency and worked as a stockbroker.

Parkin, a tenor, is the artistic director, but he also directs, choreographs and designs costumes and sets.

“I’m a one-man band,” he says.

A native of Placentia, he began his professional career as a corps dancer in the 1980 South Coast Repertory production of “Anything Goes.” He went on to dance in the corps of Ballet West in Salt Lake City for a year and began to study voice at the University of Utah. He was a voice performance major at Cal State Northridge.

“It hasn’t been easy,” Parkin says. “But we’ve hit no roadblock yet, no diaster, no angry client. We’ve been very fortunate. We prepared ourselves. We were prepared to take the opening. We were there, we delivered the product.”

As satisfying as working with children is, Parkin and Noriel say they also want to do more performances for adults.

“I’d like to do a lot of American opera--’The Crucible,’ ‘The Ballad of Baby Doe,’ Britten pieces--good theater that’s sometimes not done because of the [large] size of the house,” Parkin says.

Opera Pacific has sounded them out for a possible restaffing of its education department, Noriel says. “But we’re going to stay independent. We love our freedom.

“We don’t have to necessarily be a multimillion-dollar company. This is a nice niche we’re in.”

* Southland Opera will present Gian Carlo Menotti’s “Amahl and the Night Visitors” Sunday through Tuesday at 8 p.m. in Founders Hall at the Orange County Performing Arts Center, 600 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. $20, children; $29, adults. (714) 556-2787.

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Chris Pasles can be reached at (714) 966-5602 or by e-mail at [email protected].