“You’re not in a theater, you’re in a classroom,” Callas informs the Broadway audience, ostensibly addressing the pupils and auditors who jammed her classes. She adds, “I hope you’re not expecting me to sing.” (At that point in Callas’s career her voice was pretty shot.) The music is provided by the students, played by three real singers (beautifully aided by David Loud as the class pianist). What Caldwell does is speak the arias with a powerful dramatic inflection and intensity; you believe that she has lived deep inside that music by Bellini, Verdi and Puccini.
Her students of course have not and Callas shows no mercy to these young artists who are still wet behind the larynx. She stops her first “victim:” after exactly one note. “This is hard,” says the poor girl (Karen Kay Cody). “What’s hard is watching you make a mockery of this art,” says Callas. The second pupil is a macho tenor (Jay Hunter Morris) whom she dubs Tony Tightpants. “You lack presence,” she informs him, “I’m drinking water and I have presence.” But he pours out his heart in an aria from “Tosca” that reduces her to head-bowed appreciation. Sharon, the third student (Audra McDonald), fights back. In a gripping confrontation staged tautly by director Leonard Foglia, Callas reshapes Sharon’s singing of Lady Macbeth’s Letter Scene from Verdi’s “Macbeth” from a superficial succession of notes to an expression of dark passion. But Sharon, shaken by Callas’s ruthless methods, explodes in anger.
Actually the class has been an ordeal for Callas, too. She bursts into autobiographical recollections of her wartime years in Athens, walking with bleeding feet to the conservatory, painfully changing from an “ugly fat gift” to a slim beauty. She tosses off put-downs of her fellow sopranos (Sutherland was “a 12-foot Lucia di Lammermoor”). In two flashbacks she becomes the two crucial men in her life, her husband, Battista Meneghini, and her lover Aristotle Onassis, whom she portrays as a foulmouthed swine who hated her “boring shit music” and forced her to abort his child. In these scenes Caldwell powerfully evokes the troubled spirit that fed the fires of a unique artist. McNally’s play is a profile in courage, but Caldwell gives us its full face and figure.
