The stage is his world

By MICHELE HEWITSON

The life of the touring opera singer is terribly glamorous. You can tell that by looking at the photograph of Mark Stone in full voice.

Opera is all about swank. Look at the lovely costumes. Smell the greasepaint. Imagine the dressing rooms filled, perhaps, with bottles of champagne on ice, bowls of fruit, hothouse flowers.

On the door of Stone's dressing room in the bowels of the Aotea Centre is a little slip of paper with his name printed on it. Some wit has added the letter "d" to his surname. Knock on the door and it's opened to reveal a little ante-room with a couch and a young couple feeding a baby. The bloke is wearing an All Black shirt and making encouraging baby noises. He is wearing the All Black shirt, he tells me, because he went to see the All Blacks play Fiji in Wellington. And, "I'm wearing it right now because my baby puked up on my jumper."

On election night the bloke, who is Stone, was on stage in his finery playing Figaro on the opening night of the NBR New Zealand Opera season of Mozart's marriage farce. In his dressing room, which is utilitarian, tiny and tidy, he could easily be mistaken for a chartered accountant on holiday with the family.

Which is a low blow given that Stone, in a former life, was a chartered accountant. He studied mathematics at King's College in Cambridge because ... Well, even now he says, "It's a good question. I don't think I ever came up with the answer. Because I wasn't very good at it." He must have been quite good at it, surely? "I was quite good at it before I went to Cambridge and met all these really clever people."

He says he "just fell into chartered accountancy, as you do when you can't think of what else to do". The tedium of "adding up lists of figures" led him to merchant banking.

Merchant banking, he says, is the life you have when you're not having a life. By this point he had joined an amateur opera group and was leaving the bank at five in the evening to ride his motorbike across London to performances of a season of his first Figaro, then riding back to the office to put in a few more hours of work. "That went on for a week. It was shortly after that that I decided to pack it in." Before they packed him in? "Yes. Exactly."

Stone is not sure how he ended up here. "It was just the furthest possible thing from what I was doing."

He doesn't know "where my music came from". His parents are not remotely musical. Stone belonged to a church choir as a treble from the age of 11 until he was 13. "It was just something to do on a Sunday."

It sounds like a dull childhood.

"Have you ever been to Croydon?" he grins. He auditioned for the choir at King's College, Cambridge, and didn't get in. Here, for Stone, can be anywhere The here and now happens to be this dinky dressing room where the opera star is enjoying being reunited with his wife, mezzo soprano Michelle Walton, and 18-week-old Timothy. The last time Stone saw his family Timothy was 11 weeks old. "He did smile when he saw me but I think he just smiles at everyone now."

You don't need to ask about the downside of being a touring opera singer. The travelling is "to a certain extent inevitable. If you want to have a certain standing at home you have to be seen to have sung abroad. People are viewed as international artists or domestic artists and they're thought of differently because of it." What started as a hobby for Stone, is becoming that international career.

There are also practical concerns. If you sing in Britain, he says, you seldom sing with Italians. "Working in Europe I work with them all the time and the standard of diction is so much higher. When you're on stage having a conversation with an Italian in Italian and he starts to smirk ... "

He won't face that challenge here. But he is enjoying the freeing-up of the boundaries that opera folk in Britain tend to be sniffy about. In Britain, says Stone, you experience "people saying, 'This is opera, and this is musical theatre and this is opera'." In Canada, and New Zealand, "people are much more open to saying, 'Well, what if this works."'

After Figaro the baritone heads to Britain to do "a couple of concerts", including a concert-in-the-park event. Golly, at 33 he must be one of those famous not-quite-boy singers.

"Oh. Me? Nah," says the down-to-earth star of Figaro. "I'm not Russell Watson. I'm just another singer."

* Marriage of Figaro, Aotea Centre, August 1, 7, 9, 10, plus a 2pm matinee on August 4.