1. Welcome to Ristorante Passaggio

“Welcome to Ristorante Passaggio. Try the soup. It’s been simmering for years,” was the first line that I wrote when I began the libretto/screenplay for 9/10: Love Before the Fall. It didn’t make it into the final draft, as it was said by Lulu, the hostess, whose presence grew as she said less. By the time shooting began, Lulu’s role, like Orfeo’s, had become wordless. After all, I reasoned, Joseph Campbell would have been only tangentially interested in what the bartender and hostess said in the Cantina on Tatooine.

I approached crafting this project by seizing the triangulated space between received mainstream aesthetic and technical models. In telling an ultimately elegiac love story that unfolds not on Tatooine but in Manhattan’s Little Italy during an Italian meal at a bistro (names are important) called Passaggio, it seemed natural to think in terms of threes—what an Italian calls Sofrito, a French person calls Mirepoix, and what I learned as a kid to call the Holy Trinity—carrots (words), onions (music), and celery (images)—sautéed in a little olive oil (live performance).

More threes, for context: traditional theatrical writing dogma calls for three acts, and the three C’s—concept, character, and conflict. Libretto writing dogma dictates that instead of one page of script equaling a minute in performance, it equals two minutes when sung. Factor in theater’s march towards concision: William Shakespeare’s five acts shrank to Anton Chekhov’s four; the so-called “golden age” of three act books (beginning; middle; end) shrank to the “eleven o’clock era” as commercial authors struggled with the challenge of recapturing an audience’s attention after the intermission and delivering the all-important “palpable hit” at the golden mean point in the book.

The combination libretto / screenplay of 9/10 extends forward that continuum in what, for lack of a pre-existing term that captures it, I began identifying in interviews leading up to the release of Orson Rehearsed in 2021 as “auteur operafilm.” When asked to define it by Toronto Film Magazine I answered, “We're going for something new here together that combines the emotional impact of cutting-edge live operatic performance with the psychological verisimilitude of gritty fourth wall-demolishing auteur filmmaking. Neither cinema nor opera, but film storyboarded, directed, and edited to the rhythm of the score by the composer themself, brought vividly to life by brave, fiercely committed performers.”  

9/10 constitutes my fourth scenario to use the “eleven o’clock” dramaturgical model within a 60-minute runtime. The first was the opera Vera of Las Vegas (1996) wherein a soft folk rock torch song for the eponymous hero/ine hits the spot. The second was The Antient Concert (2017) in which James Joyce confessed the guilt he felt about his relationship with his mother. Both were powered by muscular libretti by Paul Muldoon. The third was Orson Rehearsed (2021), in which Welles’ suffered his (very real) heart attack at the “11 o’clock” spot. 9/10’s spot is more a “rolling realization” than a single dramatic event—the realization (on the part of the characters, and certainly on the part of many audience members) that everything that had just happened had taken place in the Underworld / Afterlife / Purgatory / Bardo / Insert Name Here and that the characters, untethered from chronological time, were (Possibly? Probably?) already dead. Most folks began to realize it when the two men had their heart-to-heart in the bar immediately before proposing to their partners. I like to think that the realization came to Cory first, as he sang the “Ferry Me” song for the final time in the climactic split-screen quartet; that it came to Tony when Cory turned to him and said, “So, it’s time;” and that it came to Trina and Bibi during the “Remember tonight” sextet. By the time Charon reached his hand out to Cory for payment, my contention is that all four already intuited on some level that they were no longer tethered by reality and that their journey had transformed into something more spectral.

2. Combining Videography and Cinematography

Although the difference between videographers and cinematographers is not absolute, typically, videographers focus on reportage and cinematographers focus on storytelling. One engages a videographer to document a family event, or to craft training videos, or to sell products, of course; but they also serve as photojournalists and moral witnesses—think of them as bodycams on the body politic. Videographers and their crews collaborate with documentary filmmakers to bring important, often dangerous stories to light.

Guided by the director’s storyboards and / or the shooting script, cinematographers typically oversee a larger crew within a more sprawling collaborative ecosystem. As director of photography, they create and manage the artificially constructed super-reality in which the director’s story unfolds. Their bag of tricks includes optical effects during production, and computer-generated imagery in post, and they can make the inanest narrative material look, at least, as though a meaningful story is being told. 

The Magical Realist story I told was set in a real world (or was it?) Italian bistro in Little Italy the night before the attack on the World Trade Center. Simultaneously, the bistro was a magical Underworld peopled by mythological figures—in this case, a violinist named Charon, a bartender named Orpheus, and a singer on the radio named Eurydice. I depicted the “real” world as having an undercurrent (see what I did there?) of magic or fantasy, along the lines of Toni Morrison’s Beloved in which Sethe is haunted by her daughter, or by the morality teleplays of Rod Serling’s Twilight Zone—but most like the gentle strain of it explored by the writers of shows like Northern Exposure.

I was given the great learning opportunity with 9/10 to simultaneously direct (in a three-quarter thrust theatrical staging) a silver cast of graduate students at the Chicago College of Performing Arts while filming it with the gold cast of professionals (members of my New Mercury Collective) on location. While describing the highly enjoyable process of staging it theatrically is the stuff of a different essay, I can report that, in the theater, the collective reality built up by the ensemble was experienced from the audience’s point of view. For the live performance staging, I leaned into the traditional Music Theater tropes in it—highlighting the four “I was I am I want” arias and playing the drift into symbolism (when the characters pay Charon) like Chekhov—as a gentle heightening of poetic tone and a celebration of live theater’s call for communal experience.

By contrast, I directed the film as I had storyboarded it, from the “magical” point of view of Orfeo, the bartender—a role that I originally wrote for myself, but handed over to my assistant director, the gifted (and photogenic) composer / writer Cameron Dammann once production began. (I took on the more Hitchcockian role of Mors, proprietor of the Passaggio, and appear in the background periodically.) 

I was fortunate as author / director to collaborate with director of photography Talal Jabari, a filmmaker with several decades of experience. Together, we combined aspects of both videography and cinematography to the shooting of 9/10. The visual narrative’s “magical” context of the Ristorante Passaggio was provided by four stationary cameras operated by local Chicago technicians Aaron Gottl and Matthew Peckham, who also rode the levels on the live recording. Thus, the principal characters were audio-recorded and visually documented both in live performance and for insert safety/coverage shoots in medium and wide shots. As their emotions intensified, I used tight shots either forced in post or shot by Talal with a flycam. In other words: we took the onion of cinematography, added the celery of videography, added the carrot of my directorial stance; then sautéed them in the olive oil of live performance, and arrived at this project’s visual vocabulary.

3. Coordinating Visual Language, Character, and Musical Structure

I bookended the narrative with two extended pantomimes underscored with sustained acoustic strings that constantly shifted in balance on the soundtrack between acoustic string orchestra and digital midi strings, establishing the binary rhetoric of “real / fake” and “living / dead” sound worlds. The audience is introduced first (extradiegetically, by way of titles) to the setting, to Charon, and then to the time. “Four souls” are introduced by way of their shadows, which have emerged in montage from, the image of a rising escalator, and then the facade of the World Trade Center. I began with a warm, lingering medium establishing shot of Orfeo behind his bar pouring wine from a beaker that ended with the light grace note of his dazzling smile in order to establish him as the story’s witness. As for Charon, who appeared as a card identifying him by name flashed on the screen, I knew that, for those who remembered their high school mythology, his role as conveyor of the dead would be a clue to what was to come. For the rest, his role would become clear while it did to the characters in the story. Charon was introduced in John Ford cowboy shots warmed up by a two-shot with Lulu, who acted as a sort of metaphysical Miss Kitty to his Marshal Dillon. The supers, or “Anime di Passaggio,” after being introduced individually in dirty closeups, served thereafter as sometimes-engaged observers in the “magical,” somewhat out-of-focus background of medium and wide shots, and staged throughout to provide three-tiered visual compositions. Finally, a subtitle identified the woman singing a song on the radio about a boatman—a setting of Christina Rosetti’s famous poem, “Ferry Me Across the Water”—as Eurydice. Coupled with a card that identified the restaurant as Passaggio, and the bartender’s name being Orfeo, the action’s location in Purgatory, or the bardo, is made clear to those familiar with Claudio Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo. 

At the end of the screenplay, the same sustained strings underscored the extended pantomime during which the four characters came to terms with their own deaths, led by Charon and supported gently by Lulu and Orfeo. I continued the supers’ narratives, of course; but, since throughout the previous 40 minutes physical proximity of the camera had been equated with emotional intensity, I pulled Lulu, Charon, and Orfeo into the singing characters’ orbits by switching to over the shoulder point of view. I thought of the bookending pantomimes as the Introduction and Coda (“X”) of a 60-minute musical rondo form.

After the Introduction, when I began introducing the singing characters, I switched to a chatty, intimate, vaguely claustrophobic Playhouse 90 live television feel for the edits, leaning on the stationary cameras in medium and long shots, and diving in during post occasionally for grainier, artier-looking semi-closeups. I remained with this staccato style of editing throughout the recitatives / conversations, and scenas / action beats. I thought of these as the “A” sections in the rondo.

Operatic arias often function as monologues. Talal accessed his photojournalist videographer chops and his flycam to closely shadow each character while they sang their central aria. The cinema vérité feel was intentional. I tightened these shots even further in post, forcing them into choke shots which heightened the emotional claustrophobia of the situation and resulted in an intimate grittiness that counterpointed the actors’ “all in” performances. These I thought of as “B” sections.

As different layers of the soundtrack were associated with different realities, multiple exposures signified the “magical,” whether it was to delineate two characters singing at the same time whose thoughts were nevertheless on different things, or—paired with overtly cinematic, storyboarded 360-degree camera moves (shot separately and intercut with stationary closeups)—the recurring “memoir-ial moveable feasts” that occurred when Lulu served successive courses. Split screen was matched with contrapuntal music when at least one of the characters was in “reality.” This visual gesture culminated in the 4-split screen of the final remove (“Dining Quartet #2” in the table below) where I intentionally generated tension by disregarding the 180 degree rule and juxtaposing past, future, and present events. I thought of these as the “C” sections.

Each character had a frankly cinematic Buñel-esque cutaway moment seated at the bar, as though they were sharing a drink with the bartender, Orfeo. These storyboarded setups culminated in a two-shot duet at the “eleven o’clock” spot in the narrative for the men during which the story’s theme—the didactic bit about “contented shrimp fishermen”—was laid out. Shot separately as cinematic beats and edited into the “live” performance shots, I thought of these as “D” sections.

Under the hood: I began the project in Final Cut Pro, then transferred it to Adobe Premiere Pro for the heavy lifting, and then finished up in DaVinci Resolve when color balancing began, round-tripping at the very end back to Final Cut to lay in the supertitles.

4. Combining Analogue and Digital Elements in the Soundtrack

The soundtrack was built up in three stages: I began the first stage by conducting a recording session in Ganz Concert Hall at the Chicago College of Performing Arts of the acoustic string tracks with the “Rize Orchestra.” Then I overlaid several wind parts and guitar / ukulele / fretless bass solos recorded for me by players in Los Angeles (this was during COVID) using Logic Pro, fleshing them out with some light EastWest horn and breathy Coro samples. Next, I overdubbed myself playing the harpsichord, harp, piano, concertina, and mallet parts. Finally, I stripped in Gilda Lyons’ vocal stems as Eury and the Coro, which she recorded in New York.

Eury’s narrative played out only on the radio, even though she was heard throughout the story singing the Boatman song, sometimes in duet and ensembles with the “living” characters, or Charon. When Eury sang on the radio, I altered her EQ; accordingly, when she was a disembodied “magical” or “spirit” voice, I mixed her into the orchestral fabric, permeating the instrumental score with sighs, moans, and hot-miked lubricious Pet Sounds backup singing; when she sang in duet with Trina and Bibi during their arias, I made her very nearly their corporeal timbral equal. 

Under the hood: since Gilda Lyons performed the on-screen role of Trina as well as the on-radio role of Eury and the nearly ubiquitous on-soundtrack Coro parts, she did by far the most singing—and the most kinds of singing—of anyone involved in the project.

The roles were sung live to the resulting playback in both the theater (for the staged version) and on set (for the film shoot). The singers wore lavalier microphones that almost entirely isolated their voices, enabling sound designer Tyler Ono to create the second stage of soundtrack by adding the vocal stems recorded on set into my original mix. Importantly, about 80% of the singing heard on the soundtrack is as it was performed live; automated dialogue replacement was used only to correct occasional unforced mistakes in the recording process. 

The third stage of the soundtrack work consisted primarily of creating a consistent believable sync between sound and image. Once Tyler accomplished that, he created several different soundscapes in which the action would unfold. The first was the general “A” section space of the dining room. The second was a “hollower” ambience for the innig “B” section dramatic beats taking place in the bar. This “sweet spot”—a liminal zone repeatedly likened by the characters in the libretto/screenplay to “the point at which you sense you’re high, but not so high that you’ve lost control,” or to when a bird hangs in the air before it falls—was an allusion to Richard Drew’s heart-wrenching WTC image. (Were the characters describing their own weltanschauungs and pre-9/11 Imperial American society’s?) In the bar the ambience was a bit less “real,” with the voices of the singers “drifting in” from the dining room—closer to life, consciousness? —still in their original ambience. Next, sound effects (little whisps of “real life” silverware clattering, a stray murmuring voice; the sound of thunder, the alarming sounds of a glass shattering, a chair hitting the floor, and, finally, poetically, phone calls unable to connect) were added to what otherwise was a stylized, controlled, “sterile” (dead?) sound environment. Finally, Tyler rode the spatial mix in five channel Dolby Atmos surround sound required for cinematic viewings before mastering for both DVD and CD releases.

5. Slippage and Feedback

While Tyler finished the soundtrack, colorist and filmmaker Haruka Motohashi worked to balance the color of the four stationary cameras and the flycam. We discovered at this point that something called “slippage” was occurring in the film’s “timeline” because one of the stationary cameras had been set at the wrong frame rate. As this also happened with one of the cameras used for Orson Rehearsed, I at least had an inkling of an understanding to build upon as I began my apprenticeship in this aspect of post-production by observing as first Haruka scrambled, and then Talal swept in to cope with the problem.

Issue resolved, I went to Yaddo, in Saratoga Springs, New York, where, during an artist residency, I gave a final week to integrating the feedback that I’d invited from the cast and other creative team members, touching up the soundtrack and colorization while laying in the subtitles, cards, and end titles. I screened a “final draft” it for the other artists, for whose feedback I remain grateful, integrated their feedback, and finally shared a private streamer with trusted concert and film music professionals, whose candid feedback proved crucial. After three years, knowing as one does that there are always things that can still be improved and doing the heartbreaking producer-hat calculus of accepting those things that could only be made bulletproof with the application of buckets of cash, I froze the cut and called it done.

6. Singing Actors and Acting Singers

Although the difference between musical theater acting singers and operatic singing actors is not absolute, typically, musical theater acting singers lean into characterization and operatic singing actors focus, because their audience requires it, on beauty of sound. A musical theater singer can be a Stanislavskian, or a Method actor, literally feeling the emotions that the character is experiencing, because their audience interprets their “getting choked up” as emotional authenticity. 

In order to maintain proper alignment of the instrument, most opera singers are taught that they cannot risk allowing a Strasbergian remembrance of experience to get them literally verklempt. Consequently, Classical acting is their usual go-to, as it requires “sticking to the script,” which composers and conductors appreciate. The chamber musician in them cottons to the sort of finding of truth through ensemble building of the Meisner method. Authenticity through collective imagination allows the muscles to remain aligned, and the voice to emerge, physically “unaffected” by the emotion conveyed.

Knowing the actors for whom I would craft roles, in an aggressive example of authorial use of the Strasberg method (or an extreme example of what composers call the “Italian Method” for writing operatic roles), before I began to flesh out the scenario I asked the actors to write essays about their characters that incorporated facets of their own life (and mine, too) experiences. I referenced these in the script, and the actors incorporated them into the roles they then created. 

In Robert Frankenberry (who—as he did so beautifully in Orson Rehearsed—switch hit as a performer and as musical director) I had a collaborator with the expertise as a vocal coach to help his colleagues make vocally healthy technical decisions while managing the radical shifts in singing styles central to their roles. For example, Tony’s role was written to be executed by a singing actor; Bibi’s role was written for an operetta-scaled light soubrette; Cory was written for a big-voiced, uniquely American crossover opera/musical theater voice; Trina was written for a contemporary vocal music specialist. The interaction between these vocal traditions was everything to me. Besides serving to characterize the roles, the new stylistic flavors that resulted when they sang ensembles together constituted an irresistible musical umami to composer-me and remain the most original thing about the score. I cannot overstate how grateful I am to the cast for making themselves so emotionally accessible both to the people in the room and to the cameras. That intensity of expression was the linchpin of the project; without it, a story concerning the transitioning, transformation, and transmigration of souls shall have had no soul.

As composer, I mixed received musical styles not only as an efficient way to help mainstream listeners to differentiate and characterize characters, but to goad audience members with preconceived notions of what constituted “good” and “bad” taste—a musical equivalent to the mixing of camera methodologies, acting methodologies, and staging methodologies—out of their intellectual complacence. So, to be clear: my story plus their personal recollections were the onion; the styles of music that they sang were the celery, and the way they were staged and filmed was the carrot; add the olive oil of performance and you’ve begun a stew.

7. Perpetual Soup

On the one hand, all this mixing and melding, mythologizing, and muddling, can come across as aggressively hand-of-author. Suspending disbelief as an auditor can be hard when one is constantly being pulled out of one’s comfort zone by music scored in a way that wants to be heard playing with the idea of “what’s analogue (alive?) and what’s MIDI (dead?),” what’s commercial and what’s fine art; music that intends to provoke both an emotional response and intellectual hot takes; by story elements that are “too specific not to be true;” by actors intentionally staged in different acting traditions by a director keen on the result—some breaking the third wall, others not; by a visual document edited so that it juxtaposed hectic split-screen ensembles and long, teased out handheld camera shots, sitcom back-and-forth snap edits and slow-motion beats drawing out the moment. If one prefers bento boxes to family style, orderliness to what I consider the truer-to-life nature of disorder, then one might feel, as I overheard one critic mutter years ago on his way out of one of my shows, “What the hell was that?”

On the other hand, I would contend, as two characters in the opera do, that "the point at which stability moves to instability is the sweet spot. The moment when order moves to disorder.” It’s when we realize that we are, as W.H. Auden described, “alive in a moment.” That moment is usually untidy, always authentic, and as elusive as truth; it is to be celebrated, cherished, remembered. Since such moments are inevitably followed by a fall of some sort, the film gently asks what is it that abides?

The answer this story humbly offered is a variation of the perpetual soup that has reportedly been cooking in a Thailand restaurant for nearly five decades. Together, our band of players made a musical and theatrical version of an endless minestrone—after all, anyone who has ever partaken knows that it is less about the stew and more about the gathering. Carrots: How did we spend the time? Celery: Where did it go? Onions: And, my god, how suddenly, surprisingly, unbidden, it ended. Lovingly sauté those questions and add the broth of community and you, too shall have partaken.

Learn more at the Official Website: www.9-10operafilm.art