Opera Curious: Taking a Show to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival
Fear, discovery, and learning to trust the wonder of my audience.
I did not want to be at EdFringe.
That’s the first thought I had getting off the tram in Edinburgh at the beginning of August. I was slated to do 25 shows in 25 days at 1:00 PM in the afternoon. The show? About opera. I was doing a comedy show about opera in the early afternoon in a festival I’d never been to.
There were posters everywhere. I’d opted not to purchase public signage. Cue first moment of panic. People were already walking around and handing out flyers. It turned out my venue was not slightly off the beaten path, it was very off the beaten path, and required a level of directions from the Royal Mile I wasn’t prepared to give. I picked up my posters at the bar where I was to perform. They’d put up some posters already, and I saw my face dotting the entrance to the basement. It was initially thrilling, which bled into dread. I didn’t really have a show. I had a bunch of words on a page and the backing tracks for five arias. I had the results of one panic-driven focus group with friends in Berlin, women who had all seen my tight ten and cheered me on during my opera gigs abroad.
I took my posters, found the bus back to where I had paid for lodging with a friend’s parents for the month, and admitted it to myself: I had no idea what the fuck I was doing.
The Edinburgh Fringe Festival is an annual theater festival in Scotland during the month of August. It grew up around the Edinburgh International Festival, a cutting edge, high-brow collection of music and theater events, which runs concurrently with the Edinburgh International Film Festival, the Edinburgh Book Festival, and the Edinburgh Deaf Festival, as well as an arts and crafts fair.
“The Fringe” has become the premiere theater festival in the world, hosting straight plays, musicals, comedians, performance artists, circus acts, burlesque fusion, clowns, and every type of experimental theater you can think of (and would never think of). There are a few main producers for Fringe. Gilded Balloon and Underbelly focus on comedy. Summerhall brings in experimental theater. Pleasance and Assembly have a mix of both. Monkey Barrel Comedy and Just the Tonic are comedy-specific. Artists buy venue and production packages for legitimacy, organization, and a promise of split sales. People will make money, break even, or lose it all depending on the year, the location of a poster, the flavor of ice cream on a Thursday, etc.
Then there’s the “Free Fringe Festival.” This grew up around Fringe. There are two producers: Free Fringe, from Laughing Horse, and PBH’s Free Fringe. (You learn to recognize the logos to make it easier.) All of the comedians in Berlin seem to go with Free Fringe/Laughing Horse, so I submitted materials to put up a show with them. Then I met Peter Buckley Hill, PBH himself, while doing an opera in London in May and was quickly informed I’d booked with the wrong team. (The rivalry adds a little spice to the battle for poster space around the city.)
Free Fringe is just that: free shows that ask for donations at the end. You can purchase a ticket beforehand to reserve your spot in a “pay what you can” model between £2.50 and £10.00. Or you can just show up. Success depends on popularity and the “bucket speech.” I am extremely good at speeches. I am committedly awful at asking for money.
My bucket speeches were okay.
The thing about Fringe is that it is a truly have-to-be-there experience when it comes to understanding how it works. I was warned that just showing up my first year would be dumb, leaving me unprepared to take advantage of all it has to offer. Most people go for a week or two and book spots in compilation shows to get the vibe. You learn how the city works, what the production companies specialize in, which comics are happy and which are panicking, etc. But lo, I have never been able to do anything halfway. I requested to do a full run. Life’s too short.
In the leadup, I prepared in spurts. I emailed the media contact list. I booked two interviews, and three live reviewers (though only two ended up coming). I did an hour with a London PR firm to talk about social media strategy. I cut a trailer. I completely redid my website’s landing page. I created a public Instagram account for the show. (My main account remains private, a new move in the past few months, because there are only so many offers from a thrusted buttocks in my story replies that I can handle.)
I entered Fringe from a place of panic, resigned to disaster. If we talked about it in June or July, I was down on myself. “I’m going to lose money, and it’s fine,” or “It’s going to be hard but it’s only a month and I’ll survive.” I was convinced I would spend the month overwhelmed, lacking sleep, full of FOMO, and furious that I didn’t take the time to do more to prepare. As August grew closer, I set the bar in the dirt, wishing it could just be over and I could USB the information about the experience into my brain.
When I got off the airport tram at my stop in Edinburgh, I looked around at the city and the posters and fought the urge to throw up.
The delight of Fringe, and its calling card, is that you will see shows that cannot exist anywhere else. It is a space for performers to try out forms and shows that don’t fit into normal traveling categories: stand-up comedy show. Circus act. Burlesque. Straight play. Opera. There were many posters and blurbs for shows where I thought, “This sounds like a five year old made it up. How on earth do they think they’ll attract an audience?” Psych! Those are the best shows. My most favorite show at Fringe was a show called Mr. Chonkers by a comedian named John Norris. It sounded dumb. I did not have any particular desire to go. A friend had an extra ticket. It’s billed as “Mr Chonkers. It’s a show. Absurd. Simple. Outrageous. Stupid. Fun. It’s terrible. An important waste of your time. It’s great. Please consider all of this information before coming.” To me, this sounds like garble that’s trying to be funny in the way we one would have written a facebook post in 2018. I was not into it.
Turns out, John Norris lives in LA and we probably have a few friends in common. Turns out, the show was indeed absurdist and I almost peed my pants. (I did strain my voice laughing and had to be extra careful at my own show the next day.) Turns out, what John was doing is called clowning, which is, apparently, something that still exists outside of childrens’ birthday parties and horror films, and turns out, it made me want to take a clowning class. I watched a man in a t-shirt and sweatpants follow what looked like a spontaneous train of thought to the most extreme degree, with Buster Keaton gags (underneath that hat is…. a tiny hat!) and physical comedy made funnier by repetitions (as John squished himself down to look like an Italian five year old and yelled, “SI, PAPA!,” garnering such delight from the audience that we were on the edge of our seats waiting for him to do it again, so we could go to pieces again). Was I twelve years old? Was it the 1960s? Was I witnessing the future of a tech-free utopia?
This is what an education at Fringe is: the opportunity to see performers at the peak of their craft, without the guardrails of traditional forms. The chance to see people do what they want to do without fear of anything being too dumb. There is no such thing as too dumb at Fringe. When I was there, I felt like the hierarchy of what I assumed must be cool simply evaporated.
So when I walked in with a 1:00 PM show in the basement of a bar called “The Opera Comedy Show,” with five aria backtracks and a frilly dress from Target, I was in a far better position than I first assumed.
I am an opera singer and I am a comedian. I have been paid to work in both artforms professionally. I spend time and energy developing both skills. I book practice rooms and coachings, and spend evenings doing open mics. I began training in earnest as an opera singer after teaching high school music, when I entered grad school at UCLA in 2016, at which point I was concurrently trying to get booked as an actor and taking classes at Groundlings and UCB.
Literally, any reason to get on stage.
This is particularly confusing for two groups of people: (1) Men who have grown up in the DACH region (“So your job is that you are a singer? And also your job is that you are a comedian? And also you have another job? Is that legal?”) and (2) German unemployment agencies (“This is your training certificate for studying opera, but you are also making money telling jokes like an actor? But your CV says you are a writer? What is your main job? You should only have one job. Three jobs is not healthy.”). Truly amazing.
I have put opera in my comedy show since the beginning. It’s a great gimmick — open with a joke about Los Angeles vocal fry and then bust out a few high notes. It’s how I start my show, and over the past few years I’ve developed different sets around the theme of being an opera singer. I have a set about learning languages, and I have a set about Valkyries in which I sing and translate the Hojotoho’s. The idea for my Fringe show was to do the sets about opera with real arias in between, not just a few a capella bits.
The show juxtaposes two radically different art forms: stand-up comedy, which is one person alone on stage with a microphone entertaining a room with their personal experience (incredibly intimate and agile), and opera, which is a collaboration between highly trained technicians executing an unusual, precision skill (incredibly distant and formulated). I presented the lowest art form and the highest art form weaving in between one another, forcing the audience to recognize connection from sheer proximity. A bit of a Kuleshov effect, if you will. The comedy cannot be low-brow, and the opera cannot be elite. They are presented next to one another, in shared dignity, combining their best assets: accessibility and awe.
I did not actually think about it this way when I put the show together. Mostly I thought, if I’ve got an hour, I suppose I’ll throw everything I’ve got at the stage and figure something out.
The part I didn’t expect to come out of the show? Anyone who knows me might have been able to guess. The part people enjoyed the most wasn’t the jokes, or the singing… it was the explanation of how the voice works.
The ace in my pocket remains, as always, my Big High School Teacher Energy.
The night before I left for Scotland, a few friends came over and I ran through all of my material. They helped me slot jokes into more cohesive sections, and added a few. (“Telling me The Phantom of the Opera is your favorite opera is like telling Pete Best is your favorite Beatle” — joke credit Cecilia.)
One section I added without much thought was a bit about how the voice works: the diaphragm, the intercostal muscles, the squillo. I explained resonant space and our endless drive to achieve as many overtones as possible. Opera houses are built like cakes, not amphitheaters, because sound rises. The best seats are the third or fourth ring, not the front row, etc.
This stuff is obvious to me. This stuff is boring for any singer. And this stuff is mind blowing for literally everyone else. Dear Reader, twasn’t the jokes that people wanted to talk about after the show – it was the physics of singing. After about my third show I realized people were very into learning how we make those sounds, so I added an audience participation section. I invited anyone who was brave enough to join me on stage to do a few opera warm-ups, or resonance activators, if you will. We did some deep breathing with hands on the intercostal muscles. We did a few sirens (“ooooooOOOOOOoooooooh!” like an American ambulance). I asked them where they felt the buzz. I could get the entire audience to do this as well, from their seats. (It’s hard to watch someone take a nice, big breath and not want to join.)
“The reason opera can sound so jarring if you’re not expecting it is because your eardrums are getting hit with a massive amount of sound waves. We’re massaging your inner ear with our voices. It’s weird! It’s funny! And it’s also why people who love opera will say it’s sublime. It’s possible they’re literally getting high from the sensation of so many vibrations hitting their ears. Physics, y’all.”
There is no part of me that doesn’t delight at helping a student making a connection for the first time. I am ever a teacher. I watched old gruff Scottish men smile and twentysomething London girls’ eyes grow wide with wonder as it dawned on them what was physically going on during an opera — as they were given the tools to discern emotionally effective singing from loud sounds.
And then I sang some Verdi.
When I showed up to Fringe, I thought my goal was to make a comedy show about opera. It turns out the most effective show, and the show people wanted to see, was a one-woman cabaret hour about how opera works — with plenty of jokes along the way. I am a very funny person (she said to her readers) but that’s not what struck people. Instead, they talked about what I was talking about on stage: opera, with similar enthusiasm. Nobody seemed concerned with how funny I am. Which means, I think, the jokes worked.
“An extremely talented performer who managed to take the fear out of Opera and infuse her love to the audience. Well worth a trip off the beaten track.”
“Saw this show yesterday and loved it! I have never been to a full opera and thought Steph brought her love of opera to life. Her fantastic voice was mesmerising. Well done Steph - we will definitely go to an opera now!!”
“Steph is STUNNING and the experience of watching her is a true joy. Made me fall back in love with opera.”
“An absolute hidden gem of the fringe! I knew nothing about opera and thoroughly enjoyed the show. Steph's voice and personality were incredible - an excellent blend of comedy and opera!”
“DePrez is seeking to demystify opera, and strip away the thick crust of elitism and pretension which most people assume surrounds it. The charming, voluble singer performs (beautifully) a selection of famous arias from the likes of Tannhäuser, La bohème, and La forza del destino, while breaking down their context and the emotions being experienced by the character she’s embodying... DePrez herself is an informative and patient guide. She never assumes any prior knowledge, and even demonstrates some techniques with some willing volunteers. And when she sings, the power and control she uses to be heard over a full orchestra in the concert halls of Berlin really pin back the ears in the basement of a pub in Tollcross.” – The Wee Review
“Steph DePrez’s goal is for her audience to leave ‘opera curious’ – a very achievable and lovely sentiment that she definitely accomplishes by the end of her show... Steph’s voice truly shines though in the Wagnerian and Verdi arias that she later sings. This is clearly her strength as an opera singer. Her powerful voice, piercing over the top of the luscious, thickly orchestrated music (this case a backing track) and the full might of her range in flight... It's in the semi-Masterclass portion of her show that I am truly impressed. She talks about vocal physiology with great knowledge, so much so that I would happily send any of my students to her.” – Theatre Travels
God bless the seven people who figured out how to leave an audience review on my show’s ticket listing. I didn’t know that existed until halfway through the run, and I think it helped me a lot. This is the next revelation of Fringe: Good shows get good word of mouth, and word of mouth is what grew my show.
On August 3rd, I did my show for the bar owner, James, and a fellow USTA from Fulbright Austria who was placed at the same school where I worked outside of Vienna. He was running his own show: Accordion Ryan’s Pop Bangers. He’s done Fringe before so he came out to support.
The next day, I had two audience members. The day after that, eight. This is how it went, bouncing between eight and twenty audience members. No one showed up on the 10th. I had a whopping, phenomenal show of 20 people on the 15th. I took the 16th off. I was sick on the 21st. On August 26th, the penultimate show, I packed the room with 27 audience members and had to pull out chairs from behind the bar that thus far had remained unused until the 4:00 PM show.
By the end of my run, 22 shows in 25 days, I had performed for a grand total of 221 audience members, paying between £2 and £10 a pop, not counting tips. As they left, I asked how they found the show. They found it on the Fringe app, or saw a poster, or a friend recommended it. They lived around the corner, or they were looking for something a little different. A lot of folks came because they like opera, but the most complimentary and effusive folks were those who’d walked in looking for a traditional comedy show. “I come for a week every year and see five shows a day,” said one man. “This is my last day, and this might be the best show I’ve seen.”
(I did have the penultimate show recorded. I’ll probably used clips to promote a Berlin premiere, but I remain subbornly committed to keeping the bulk of my comedy in-person.)
By setting my bar in the dirt, I was able to leap over it. I ran into comics who’d gone in with a big producer to the tune of £3,000 and were desperate for an audience just to break even. I met a comic who’d signed up with Free Fringe and, by the end of the run, told me he’d paid for Christmas for his wife and two kids. And then there was me, who managed to make back my initial investment ofabout £800 by week three. I sublet my apartment in Berlin for slightly less than I was renting in Edinburgh, and used tips for food. I kept up with freelance writing in the mornings before my show.
Housing is, as you might expect, how Fringe destroys most artists. You can rent a room for the month at a university 45 min out of town for £1,400. You can sign up for dorm housing in the city for slightly more. Home rentals are off the charts, so pack as many members of your production team in as possible. People swap out rooms and beds via facebook groups throughout the run.
I stayed with the parents of a Berlin friend. They’d rented out rooms to Fringe performers in the past and were happy to let me have one for a very reasonable rate, without the festival surcharge. This was pure happenstance, and ended up defining much of my experience, because Honor and Dorian are two of the most curious, thoughtful, and kind people I’ve ever met.
I knew housing would set the tone for everything else. I told myself I just needed a safe bed to sleep in and I’d be fine. I didn’t need to be too comfortable or have lots of space, I just needed to be able to rest. So I didn’t worry too much about the housing itself, only that I’d secured it for the month. Much of my initial trepidation about attending Fringe was that I hadn’t done much research on housing, so as soon as I heard about the possibility of a room, I nabbed it. As August grew closer, I worried that being a lodger might create additional anxieties and tiny dramas throughout an already dramatic month, for which I did not feel prepared.
Oh, how wrong I was. My Fringe was a “success” based on the convergence of multiple factors, but if I had to pick one thing, it would be the community and support I received from Honor and Dorian Wiszniewski. They graciously welcomed me into their home on the recommendation of their son Sam, a fellow comic who brought vegan haggis to my Thanksgiving (an unexpected hit). We arranged the details over WhatsApp. I had no idea who I was meeting or what the situation would be like until I showed up on their doorstep.
I’m sure you can think of a few community “centers of gravity” in your life: homes where people come for coffee and stay for dinner. Places where you aren’t afraid to ask to use the bathroom or fill yourself a cup of water. Hosts who make you feel doted upon without feeling put upon. I was a lodger, a performer imposing upon their life and livelihoods (since they work from home). I never once felt like an imposition.
I was naturally tentative to engage too much in conversation in the beginning, as a renter and as someone who usually feels too big for most spaces. (I’m not good at being small or subtle and I get very self conscious about it.) I tried to stay scarce. I tiptoed into the kitchen after they’d settled into work and drank the dregs from the French press, so as not to make any more mess.
That lasted a few days, until I was telling Honor about opera and life in Berlin and my mom and suddenly we’ve been standing in the kitchen for two hours, both crying, talking about parents and children and aging and memory and love with a gigantic hug at the end. The next day Dorian, who’s Irish and Polish, mentioned that the thesis architecture project for his graduate students is designing an imagined university in Derry, and with a few well placed questions I’d cracked him and managed to receive the history of northern Ireland from someone whose family lived it.
We talked art and history. They weren’t afraid to disagree and correct one another and ask deeper questions and laugh. They have a strong moral awareness and sense of justice that was evident in the way they talked about building and teaching and raising their family. They were curious about me, and asked questions and made me feel welcome and funny and special. They came to my show — Honor, twice. They told their friends to come. They wanted to hear how it went, every day. And when, halfway through Fringe, I was offered a full time marketing position back in Berlin, Dorian insisted on breaking out the good gin.
I am very aware that the success of most of my life, if not all of my life, is predicated upon the communities that I fall into. I could have been in a dorm. I could have been in a solo Airbnb. Instead, I was a lodger with two Scottish architects, and if I had to pick one thing about Fringe, I’d say that made all the difference.
Then there was the city. I visited Edinburgh for two days in 2009, when I was studying abroad in London. I bought the family tartan (mother’s side) and toured the castle. I remember next to nothing from that trip, which is fine, because I’ve written over it a hundred times with the artist’s wonderland that I just experienced.
I mentioned that Fringe runs alongside a concurrent arts festival, film festival, and book festival. I nabbed tickets to two book events and saw paragons of fantasy and imagination V.E. Schwab and Samantha Shannon speak about their new books — and then I got to meet them. I saw a documentary about Aubrey Gordon (of Maintenance Phase fame), “Your Fat Friend,” and got to ask the director Jeanie Finlay a question during the Q&A. I saw the ballet of Stravinski’s Rite of Spring. I made friends at the arts and crafts fair, and walked away with far too many pairs of earrings.
Every day I woke up, worked for a few hours on freelance writing assignments, showered and put on my show makeup, took the bus to my venue, greeted Miles, Levie and James with a loud announcement that it’s going to be a great day, set up the basement, warmed up, and performed for an hour. Then I changed, handed the room off to the Dungeons and Dragons show, headed out into the city to see a comedy show, visit the craft fair, or wander one of the dozens of independent bookstores for my personal game of bookstore bingo. I read a book a week, and managed to read genres other than fantasy romance for the first time in three years.
For four weeks, I was in a personal wonderland. I have not been that consistently happy in years, and certainly not since my mom died.
Why did this happen? Why was I so happy? I’ve been trying to pin it down since returning home to Berlin. The obvious one is that my job every day was performance. I got up in front of people to sing and make them laugh, which filled my cup. And I was doing it in a city full of energy, surrounded by art makers and people who wanted to see experimental theater or circus burlesque or musical puppetry. Maybe I’d end the day on the upper level of a repurposed double decker bus at midnight at a love letter writing workshop led by a circus performer, or front row in a massive venue for one of my favorite comedians. Or maybe I’d be out to lunch with a couple who happened to come to my show and afterwards became fast friends – a singer from Venezuela and his husband, the director of the Vienna Summer Music Festival. I went home each night and told Honor about my day and read for a few hours in bed. I committed to eight hours of sleep a night, and nine if I could get myself to stay in bed. Because I was singing every day, I prioritized sleep. It was probably the most well-rested month of my life.
Notably, I spent very little time dating/thinking about dating. The men I matched with on Bumble were theater nerds who became show buddies. I met a high school theater teacher from Boston who came to my show and an immersive theater producer from New York, who quit his job and is adding Berlin to his travel list. I matched with the one other Domer in Edinburgh and we talked about football over beers, and what it’s like to live in Europe. I did go on one date with a Scottish man from Glasgow. I understood 70% of what he said to me. (I smiled a lot.) But dating was never the centerpiece of my thoughts, as it often is when my 34-year-old-family-aspirational self is in Berlin. It felt really nice to just… not care.
“How was Fringe?”
It was a wonderland of books and history. It was sixteen guest spots that had me running all over the city with a fanny pack of flyers. It was midnight lines at grocery stores. It was saying yes to extra tickets and small venues with no idea what the show might be. It was a deep-dive into Scottish politics. It was afternoons spent reading in the calm and welcoming the Book Festival courtyard. It was ancient castles and ghost stories that I had literally run across the street to avoid hearing. It was a weekend of laughing my ass off with a visit from Britt and Daniel. Britt stood up on the top level of a bus — A NORMAL BUS OF NORMAL COMMUTERS — to pitch my show (as I cowered in embarassment in the front row) and then handed everyone a flyer. She got four people to come!! It was having seven members of the cast of the International Festival’s Tannhäuser, flown in from the Deutsche Oper, come to my show (including my dear friend Julie, as well as Clay Hilley, the Tannhäuser himself!) It was lunch after my show with Cath the second week and Grace the fourth week, two fellow cast members from Regents Opera’s Walküre. It was discovering friendships with people like James and David and Mari and Shannon. It was seeing Moni crush it with crowd work. It was running into Kat at a coffee shop.
It was sobbing at the beach, thinking about how I made something out of nothing and put it on a stage and convinced people to come, and then I got to stand by the door and watch their smiles as they left. It was hearing, “I’ve never been to an opera. I think I’ll go,” over and over, for a month.
Mostly, it was knowing I took the two things I love and wove them together into something beautiful, and gave it away.
To book The Opera Comedy Show, please email deprezcreative@gmail.com.
I felt I was right there...enjoying each moment with you❤️❤️❤️