ARTS AND LEISURE DESK : NEW YORK TIMES THEATER;

Where Musicals and Opera Overlap, a Hybrid Emerges 
By NAHMA SANDROW 

THE line dividing opera and musical theater has never been clear. But in recent times both forms have been expanding, and crossovers are increasingly common. In fact, some people deny that any distinction exists. To explore that point, the Center for Contemporary Opera in New York presented a rather daring experiment earlier this year: the first act of an opera performed twice -- by a musical theater cast before the intermission, and then by an opera cast.

If lobby chat and questionnaires filled out by the audience reveal anything, most people preferred the beauty of the opera-trained voices and the passion and movement of the theater cast. They wanted it all, and why not? For the composer and librettist, the chance to hear the two versions -- performed in concert style -- was so fruitful that they have now created a hybrid, which they envision performed, and even cast, in a new way. 
The experiment involved the first act of ''Chéri,'' an opera based on Colette's novel of the same name, with music by Michael Dellaira and libretto by Susan Yankowitz, a playwright, and mostly written in 2000. The Center for Contemporary Opera, which was founded by the conductor Richard Marshall to encourage the creation of new work and support that which already exists, took over the Clark Studio Theater at Lincoln Center for two consecutive evenings last winter.

The first night, all 147 seats were filled by the center's subscribers, friends and some opera and theater people. By the second night, word of the experiment had attracted the opera composers Mark Adamo and John Corigliano and representatives from American Opera Projects Inc., which presents new works and works in progress; the Mary Flagler Cary Charitable Trust, a foundation with interests in opera; and the New York Festival of Song, which encourages songwriting through performance and commissions. 

When people talk about opera, they usually mean a specific musical form that flowered in the 19th century: through-sung with no spoken dialogue, expressing large emotions in large voices suited to large (unmiked) opera houses. By musical theater, they usually mean the Broadway musical: a play of spoken dialogue, with musical numbers arising from the dramatic action.

But these distinctions have never been rigid. Mozart's opera ''The Magic Flute'' uses spoken dialogue; ''Porgy and Bess,'' which George Gershwin originally wrote as through-sung and considered a ''folk opera,'' has been performed in theaters as often as in opera houses. Marc A. Scorca, the president of Opera America, a service organization for opera companies, exclaimed in an interview, ''How wonderful Sondheim and 'Carousel' sound in opera voices!'' 

These days, there is a growing repertory of intellectually and musically challenging pieces that are difficult to categorize; for them, Eric Salzman, the associate artistic director of the Center for Contemporary Opera, deploys the familiar all-purpose term ''music theater.'' Other descriptions include ''singing theater'' and ''opera theater.'' Perhaps the most useful formulation is Mr. Scorca's: opera ''emphasizes music,'' he says, and theater ''emphasizes words.'' 

From the start of the ''Chéri'' project, music and text urged each other along. Mr. Dellaira and Ms. Yankowitz, who are both in their 50's, were equally persuaded that the Colette novel would work as the basis for a libretto. Set in the darkly elegant demimonde of pre-World War I Paris, the story explores the doomed passion between an aging courtesan named Léa and a beautiful but decadent young man she calls Chéri.

Mr. Dellaira's adventurous appetite for language has led him to set and record texts by the poet Emily Dickinson, the novelist John Dos Passos and the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. A member of the board of the Center for Contemporary Opera, he has a doctorate in music from Princeton (where he studied with Milton Babbitt) and has written cerebral 12-tone music as well as the words and music for a rock-pop song cycle called ''Annette.'' The recording, on which he plays keyboards, became a Billboard magazine Top Album Pick.

Mr. Dellaira said he had learned a lot from rock and pop about how to write opera. ''It's stylized sung speech,'' he said. ''The recitatives in 'Chéri' are like rock verses. When I think both energy and information, and tuneful, I think rock.'' 

Ms. Yankowitz, too, has found adventurous ways to fuse language and sound. In the 1970 ''Terminal,'' which she wrote for the director Joseph Chaikin and the Open Theater, the actors' hands and feet elicited music from the surfaces they touched, words dissolved into sound, and sounds communicated emotions and experiences outside the usual range of theatrical expression. She wrote a novel, ''Silent Witness,'' and then a screenplay from it, set inside the mind of a deaf-mute, and a 1991 play, ''Night Sky,'' about an aphasic who speaks in a poetic language stripped of syntax. Also directed by Mr. Chaikin, it was partly inspired by his own battle with aphasia.

Among her recent projects have been a gospel and blues opera with the jazz musician Taj Mahal and, with the film composer Elmer Bernstein, a romantic fantasy in which characters slide from speech into song. ''The Revenge,'' a play she was inspired to write after seeing Verdi's opera ''Rigoletto,'' will have a reading on Tuesday, directed by Mr. Chaikin and starring F. Murray Abraham. (Ms. Yankowitz used my English translation of Victor Hugo's French play ''The King Amuses Himself,'' which was the basis of the libretto for ''Rigoletto.'')

''Music elevates the text,'' Ms. Yankowitz said. ''It allows for the extremely dramatic gesture that most theater these days does not accommodate.'' A libretto must ''rest on a bed of music,'' she added, and be singable: ''I sit there at my desk opening my mouth. Open vowels! Faaaall, not winnnter; faaaall!''

While the composer and the librettist worked together, the two casts (15 people in all, with one performer playing the same role in both versions) rehearsed separately. Since they started with different priorities, they discovered on the nights of the performances that the two versions had diverged dramatically.

For example, the opera version of Léa, Marion Capriotti, began with the music and ''let the words be an embellishment,'' she said. Planted behind her music stand, shoulders squared, Ms. Capriotti focused on the score and worked throughout the rehearsal period ''to give the audience a line of music they can sink their ears into.'' Thus, in Léa's big aria mourning the loss of Chéri (sung by Nicholas Phan), because of ''the length and sweep -- long lines and long releases -- what I had to do was get behind them and let the outpouring of sound carry the emotional content of the aria.''

Since an opera singer's job, especially with a new opera, is to allow the audience to hear the music in the composer's head, preparation means intensive practice. In the theater, on the other hand, rehearsal of a new play is often a process of discovery, a time when the actor interprets the material creatively in collaboration with the writer, the director and the other actors. Ann Crumb, the music theater Léa, tried different readings right up to the last performance: different rhythms, lengths of notes, vocal registers.

Ms. Crumb found it frustrating to be tied to the music stand. When Léa was scolding young Chéri (Erik Lautier), she slammed the music stand down to punctuate her lines. She sang tilting her curly head toward Chéri, boxing at him playfully, leaning against him seductively. Ms. Crumb has sung art songs as well as jazz, and Mr. Dellaira praised her ''musical, expressive'' voice. Yet she refers to herself primarily as an actress. Her phrasing, she said, is ''propelled by what the character is feeling,'' and she will ''sacrifice a sound that I could make fuller or purer'' if necessary to articulate a word. ''Emotion colors sound,'' she said. ''I love the multiple colors of the voice.''

By the start of the dress rehearsal, the two casts were singing differently enough to affect the piano accompaniment. ''I work to singers' strengths,'' said Mark Shapiro, the production's music director who served as the pianist. ''I wanted the opera singers to sing out -- they have more power vocally -- and I tried to approximate for them on the piano more orchestral color. Whereas theater singers, because of the nature of speech, which is their primary focus, sing shorter sounds. I accompanied them with lighter sound, less pedal, shorter notes -- a drier sound.''

After the casts disbanded, the composer and librettist listened to the tapes of both versions over and over, discussing what they heard. The ''Chéri'' that has emerged is an unconventionally eclectic mix of techniques from various musical and dramatic genres: one rather comic character will be operatic in his exaggerated booming, while another will veer toward musical comedy. Some major lines that had been delivered in sprechstimme will now be sung, and vice versa. 

Response to the experiment showed that ''Chéri'' has potential as opera or as musical theater, confirming Mr. Dellaira's long-standing dream of a ''Chéri'' with opera voices in a Broadway theater and with musical theater voices at Lincoln Center -- simultaneously. (Is that so far-fetched, when the director Baz Luhrmann's version of ''La Bohème'' is expected to open on Broadway this December?) In fact, several companies have expressed interest in producing ''Chéri'' -- both acts this time. And the collaborators hope to workshop the piece in its new hybrid form. 

Looking back on the experience, they don't seem to realize that they think of themselves in terms that transcend the old distinctions between words and music. ''I'm corny,'' Mr. Dellaira confessed. ''I'm not embarrassed by big gestures and strong emotions, which are not in fashion these days. I'm trying to get the audience to tears -- no, to get myself to tears -- and do to them what Puccini does to me.''

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Ms. Yankowitz, in her way, agreed. ''I'll write more librettos,'' she said. ''I like the way the words sound. For a person who can't carry a tune, like me, it's my way of singing.''