‘Birds & Balls’, Sports Day at SF Jazz

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Nikola Printz as Billie Jean King

Photo credit: Kristen Loken

By Elsa Tranter
4/9/2024

Opera Parallèle produced a double bill, blended as one, at San Francisco Jazz Center last week.  It was titled poetically Birds and Balls and described two sporting events, one obscure and bizarre, the other familiar and mainstream.  Each opera had its own composer and librettist and there was some overlapping of the cast.  To me, one worked well, the other not so much.

Birds (Vinkensport or The Finch Opera) was composed by David T. Little and Royce Vavrek; it was followed by Balls by Laura Karpman and Gail Collins.  Bridging the two pieces, which were performed with no intermission, was new music composed for this occasion. Brian Staufenbiel and associates directed the production. 

The SF Jazz Center was well transformed into a tennis court with Howard Cossell, (played by Mark Hernandez) the well-known sportscaster in a box way up high.  He represented ABC’s Wide World of Sports, to tie the two pieces together.

The first opera featured contestants in a song competition: finches, yes those tiny songbirds.  Apparently, in Belgium, there is a long tradition, going back to the seventeenth century, of awarding prizes to the finch that trills the most trills in a set amount of time.  On the face of it that sounds pretty weird and the opera itself proved to be the same.  Each of the six owners of the contestant birds had a story, somewhat clichéd, which they told us in turn, complete with video projections to illustrate their words.  There was little interaction among the singers; mostly they told their stories to us;  there was a sex scene shown in large projection which I found gratuitous.  The singing was uniformly good and the music well played, but the overall effect, for me (and my companion), was not particularly inspiring.  The cast included (along with the sometimes overly clever names of their birds): Jamie Chamberlain (Holy St Francis); Daniel Cilli (Atticus Finch); Nathan Granner (Hans Sachs); Chelsea Hollow (Farinelli); Shawnette Sulker (Sir Elton John); and Chung-Wai Soong (Prince Gabriel III of Belgium).  The butler was sung by Mark Hernandez.  Nicole Paiement, Opera Parallele’s Artistic and General Director, conducted the orchestra with her usual vigor.  I heard no wrong notes!!

Following the interlude we got to what was for me a more satisfying part two – maybe because I’m a big tennis fan and have followed Billie Jean King’s career my whole life – Balls.  This was a reenactment of ‘the battle of the sexes’ tennis match in 1973 between Ms King and Bobby Riggs, the well-known chauvinist tennis pro.  I was very impressed with the athleticism of Nikola Printz even before they started singing: quite a lot of push-ups and lunges on stage.  In between their singing, the two competitors (Nathan Granner was Mr Riggs) did a lot of running and hitting—tiring to watch.  They were both in excellent voice and costumed very authentically.  The video projections worked well to give us all a real sense of being there in the stadium (in contrast to the Birds where it didn’t add much).  Smaller parts were sung by Daniel Cilli as husband Larry King; Tiffany Austin as Billie Jean’s secretary (and secret lover); Gabriela Linares as Billie Jean’s doubles partner Rosie Casals; Shawnette Sulker as Susan B. Anthony (a little magic realism there); and a quartet of Jamie Chamberlain, Nina Jones, Chad Somers, and Chung-Wai Soong. The music was engaging and all the singing and acting went together; some comical moments included both Nicole Paiement and Brian Staufenbiel in video interviews.  Altogether the piece was much stronger and came together in a satisfying way.

The audience was most enthusiastic and left the theater smiling and light-footed.  We saw the next-to-last performance on Sunday April 7 afternoon.  It was fun to see so many familiar faces in the crowd.

David T. Little (Birds composer), Laura Karpman (Balls composer), Nicole Paiement (conductor)

Elsa Tranter is a Bostonian who has lived in Berkeley for over 50 years and has been an opera goer for most of those years. She worked as a graduate student adviser at UC Berkeley and still attends Cal Performances regularly. Her favorite composer is Wagner and her favorite opera is Les Troyens.