Any good one-person show — even one built around examples from the Great American Songbook — has to be an autobiography.
At least, that is what Sylvia McNair believes.
“It’s my hope that people will come away from my show with a good idea of Sylvia McNair, the human being,” McNair said, speaking by phone from her home in Indiana.
One aspect of McNair is already well-known. For two decades, McNair was one of the opera world’s leading performers, appearing with the major U.S. companies — the Metropolitan Opera, Chicago Lyric Opera and San Francisco Opera — as well as performing extensively in Europe.
She also sang with top orchestras, and made dozens of recordings: operas, choral works, art songs, along with a couple of albums of songs by Jerome Kern and Harold Arlen.
“It was fantastic, I enjoyed most of it, but I thought after 20 years, that was enough,” McNair said. “So I thought I would sort of wrap that part of my life in a pretty little box with a lovely bow, put it on the shelf and spend the next 20 years of my musical life exploring something else.”
Which is why, McNair said, she titled the show she is bringing to Tulsa “Subject to Change.” The show is part of Choregus Productions’ season.
“It’s a show that been in the process of evolving for the last five or six years,” she said, laughing. “But then, that’s the way life is. Your life will change, and I’m changing along with it.”
Some of the changes McNair has gone through have been deliberate choices — leaving behind opera to pursue a life-long love of musical theater and popular standards, for example, or becoming a member of the faculty of her alma mater, Indiana University.
Other changes were not her idea at all. She went through a painful divorce — all the more painful “because it was imposed upon me,” she said.
Then, two years ago, she was diagnosed with having an advanced and aggressive form of breast cancer that ultimately required her to undergo a mastectomy.
“Those two things — the divorce and the cancer — made the rest of what I was going through look simple,” McNair said. “But it also, in a way, helped me focus on doing what I wanted to do, doing the things I love. And the repertoire of musical theater is one of those things I just love.
“I love how doing these songs and these shows have made me stretch and grow as a singer and performer,” she said. “And I’ve always loved words. For me, a good lyric is as satisfying as a five-star gourmet meal. I love connecting with an audience, making eye contact, seeing their smiles and smiling back at them.”
That discovery came about after McNair had already spent many years studying and playing the violin. She took up the instrument at age 7, and her dream for many years was to play as part of the Cleveland Orchestra in her native state of Ohio.
“I was college, and had taken some singing lessons really as a lark, when I realized I enjoyed practising singing a lot more than I was enjoying practising the violin,” McNair said, laughing. “And all those lovely things about connecting with an audience are hard to do when you’re in the middle of the fiddles in an orchestra.”
McNair still has her violin, and has been known to bring out it during the course of “Subject to Change.”
“I’m a pretty rusty violinist,” she said, “but I chose repertoire that will make me sound good.”
While “Subject to Change” is the title of her show, she said she isn’t planning on making changes for her two shows in Tulsa. One will be done in the conventional theater setting of the PAC’s Williams Theatre, while the second show will take place in the PAC’s Doenges Theatre, arranged to have both cabaret table and theater-style seating.
At both shows, McNair will be accompanied by pianist Ted Taylor.
“Sylvia McNair: Subject to Change” concert
7:30 p.m. Tuesday, Oct. 28
Williams Theatre, Tulsa Performing Arts Center, 110 E. Second St.
Tickets: $30, available by calling 596-7111, or online at tulsaworld.com/mytix.
“Sylvia McNair: Subject to Change” cabaret
7:30 p.m Wednesday, Oct. 29
Doenges Theatre, Tulsa Performing Arts Center, 110 E. Second St.
Tickets: $25 theater seating, $30 table seating available by calling 596-7111, or online at tulsaworld.com/mytix.
