Love story with a tough centre

Karena Lyons (foreground) plays Matalena in C.

I can hear the chorus belting out their lungs from the other side of the road, in the best Broadway tradition, but they're not singing Rodgers and Hammerstein.

A few minutes later, I put faces to voices. With opening night only a week away, the C company is being drilled in a chorus number by director Anna Marbrook, moving towards her Les Mis-style at the words, "Now I can feel the release".

C is one of the most ambitious projects of this week's Ignite05 and, one floor up from the chorus rehearsal, musical director John Gibson and conductor John Rosser are coaching some of the principals.

Most impressive is the sinuous young Fiso Tavu'i with an alluring Sam Cooke tremor to his voice, running over one of his songs as the drag queen Paulini.

For C read Carmen, although bullrings and smugglers' lairs are now city streets and an Auckland night club which "keeps changing its location all the time, a very urban kind of thing," explains Gibson.

Don Jose is now Iosefa, the son of a Samoan minister, a rapper who spins lines like, "When you lie about ability, it's a lie-a-liability".

This joint project of NBR New Zealand Opera and the Edge originated in an initiative of some years back, in which school groups were encouraged to create their own versions of the opera the company was mounting at the time.

Back then, I was suspicious of how much of the material actually comes from the youngsters, and Gibson now admits his own input is "massive", although Rosser reminds me "it did start with kids writing down a whole lot of words in response to a situation from Carmen and then us fighting to get some sort of tune out of them".

C is essentially "a musical with the soul of an opera" and Gibson finds a lot of modern musicals depend too much on "a spectacle kind of notion without that special thing between drama and music".

An operatic approach, certainly in discipline, will add concentration. "We have tried to get everything sung," he adds. "There are ensembles, segues and even cabalettas at the end of acts."

With these operatic touches are drag queens, pill-popping choruses and raunchy rap tags like, "No hoes before bros", but Gibson feels it is important "to honour the toughness of it. The roving club culture is quite close to the original gypsy thing in Carmen."

"If you strip away the romanticism," adds Rosser, "the Bizet is pretty tough too."

"After all," adds Marbook, joining us from her rehearsal, "the work was developed initially from a raw, truthful place and we wanted to capture that."

For Marbrook, the main challenge was "telling a story completely through music and song. We started with a lot of dialogue and the more we worked, it just dropped out. Ideally, I'd like to have none. I've learned a lot about storytelling through this."

It has been a slow process. Looking back on three months' intensive work, she thanks New Zealand Opera and the Edge for "honouring the writing process. In New Zealand we don't allow enough time for development. You don't know what is going to happen and we have been fortunate in having two companies that have had the faith to allow us to go through this process."

After two years, C is shaping up for a possible life beyond this week's staging, which the company describes as a sneak preview. But as Gibson says, "In the final count it is a piece that tells a story, is really rich, runs from whoa to go, and doesn't let you out."

Performance

* What: C, in Ignite05 Festival

* Where and when: Auckland Town Hall, Friday 7.30pm, Saturday 5pm (free admission)