Though her thesis is due in just four days, Alexis Rodda ’10 isn’t spending much time in her carrel in Firestone Library. Instead, the English major is working onstage at Richardson Auditorium, preparing to perform in an opera that she wrote and directed, and that is unrelated to her senior thesis.
Rodda collaborated with music major Max Mamon ’10 to produce the opera, “Rosaleen,” which tells the story of a 19th-century woman who has three stillborn births that her husband attributes to an alleged affair she is having with his brother. Neither Rodda nor Mamon is involved in the Program in Theater, and the students managed the production almost entirely independently, though they received support along the way.
Paul Muldoon, chair of the Lewis Center for the Arts, took the project under his wing after responding to the “passion” he said he saw from Rodda and Mamon.
“Rosaleen was the first student opera we’ve supported,” Muldoon said in an e-mail. “I’m sure the music department helps with many. But music theater is an art form in which the Lewis Center is particularly interested.”
Rodda, a classically trained singer, has been interested in opera since she was in high school. She was inspired to try writing a work of her own after she starred in a few productions and watched countless more at the University, ultimately choosing to write an opera because the style better suited her voice.
Rodda noted that the opera includes “a lot of rose symbolism,” but that other elements include typical opera themes like madness and rage. “Opera is very much over-dramatic,” she said.
“Rosaleen” is not a true opera, since not every action is sung, Rodda and Mamon said. They have instead coined it a “new musical drama,” because it incorporates some aspects of musical theater while maintaining the melodramatic feel and artistic style of an opera.
Mamon started working on the production about a year ago, when Rodda approached him about composing the opera’s libretto, suggesting that it could be his senior independent work.
Mamon’s adviser, music professor Dmitri Tymoczko, said that “Rosaleen” was the first opera he has advised. “While it is not unprecedented to take on music composition for an opera as a senior thesis,” Tymoczko said, he estimated that students undertake this type of project once every five years.
With Muldoon’s help, Rodda and Mamon secured funding for the production. They reserved Richardson Auditorium, the most common venue for on-campus operas, for 8 p.m. tonight and Saturday.
Rodda noted that reserving the venue for two nights was an achievement in itself, as the auditorium is expensive and often involves a lot of “red tape.”
“I had to learn how to fireproof the entire set,” Rodda said. The stage manager for the production, Sarah Hedgecock ’13, said that another unusual requirement was that all stage props had to go on wheels.
In the process of producing “Rosaleen,” Rodda said she briefly entertained the idea of finding a separate director. But because she had “a very specific vision” for the opera, Rodda decided to take on the role herself to keep a tighter helm on her production.
Hedgecock described the director-actress as “very hands-on and engaged in the production.”
“Alexis will be on stage when she suddenly notices something, switches to ‘director-mode’ and then resumes the scene,” Hedgecock added.
Rodda’s ability to multitask makes it easy to forget that it is her first time directing.
Tymoczko noted that the undertaking — which has more than an hour’s worth of music for an entire orchestra, where every movement must also coincide with the script and scene work — was no simple task. Most senior independent work, he said, is on a much smaller scale — anything from a quartet piece to something for an orchestra or jazz band.
“One nice thing about Princeton is that extraordinary is the norm,” he said, describing his advisee as “unusually independent” and “very ambitious.”
Both Rodda and Mamon plan to continue working in the arts in the future. Rodda plans to pursue opera after graduation, while Mamon, who has already been accepted to the Graduate Musical Theatre Writing Program at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, will continue down the path of music composition.
For students who have “even an inkling” of pursuing something similar, Rodda suggested that they “start early.” Though she started working a year in advance, the process was still “logistically very complicated,” she said.
But this type of effort has its rewards. “It’s just been such a joy to be able to do something I really love every day,” Mamon said.
Correction: A previous version of this article misidentified Rodda's major.
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