Nickell’s Bag

It’s 6:10 p.m., and I’m driving across town like a bat out of hell, cramming a piece of undercooked frozen pizza in my mouth, thinking: We screwed up. Who in their right mind would come to an event at this hour — on a rainy Wednesday, to boot? I helped organize this thing, and even I am late.

I find a parking space near the courthouse and scurry through the rain, which is now freezing to a spiky sleet. I’m headed to the Badlander, for the first in a planned series of concerts I helped organize under the auspices of the newly minted Montana Lyric Opera Company (I’m on the board of directors). Yes, I said opera…in a bar, on a Wednesday in the rain, in a town that has practically no established exposure to opera, at an hour when people should rightly be eating dinner.

That’s exactly what they’re doing, too, I think to myself. Bad planning, Joe. Bad freakin’ planning.

I round the corner of Ryman street, and see, to my chagrin, nothing. The place looks dead. The street outside the door of the Badlander is completely shut down, blocked by a small fleet of excavators that have turned the pavement into mounds of dirt and broken concrete. There’s nobody standing outside the bar, nobody walking toward the bar. Nobody anywhere, in fact.

I take a deep breath, and pull the door open.

That’s as far as I get.

The scene inside the bar is as chaotic and steamy as the street outside is cold and barren. People are backed up in the inside doorway, paying admission and trying to find a way through the standing-room-only crowd. I turn around once I get inside, and snap a photo.

It’s a madhouse. And then someone starts to sing, and the crowd goes silent. It’s Gina Lapka, executive director of the new opera company, standing in front of the crowd wearing a hilarious plastic viking helmet. Lapka sings a gorgeous aria from the otherwise forgettable opera, “Die Fledermaus,” by Johann Strauss. Her gleaming voice fills to the vaulting room, resonates from the tin ceiling. In the silent crowd, it feels as loud and powerful as any rock concert I’ve seen at the club.

When the aria ends, the crowd goes wild. People shout and cheer and whistle, hoisting cans of Pabst Blue Ribbon (PBR co-sponsored the event).

I make my way through the crowd, and run into Chris Henry, co-owner of the Badlander.

“This is craaaaazy,” he says, his eyes wide. “I had no idea the opera posse in this town was so big. People are eating this shit up!”

It’s true. As the night goes on, light musical theater numbers commingle with core standards of the operatic canon. Mature professional singers tag-team with students. Whatever and whoever comes next, the crowd sits rapt, then cheers loudly. Jen Jones and Angela Andersen bring the house down with a delectably tender rendition of “Sous le dôme épais,” a familiar duet from Delibes’ opera, “Lakme.” Alicia Bullock-Muth follows up with a hilariously melodramatic run through Victor Herbert’s “Art is Calling for Me,” swishing her feather boa as she sings.

Toward the back of the bar, a couple stops me.

“Do we know you from somewhere?” asks the woman. I explain that I write for the newspaper. “Doooooh, darn it, you were right,” she says to her husband, laughing.

She explains that she is here to hear her daughter sing as part of the show.

“She’s 17, so it’s her first time in a bar,” says mom (I’m keeping identities quiet here for reasons that are probably obvious). “I think it is so cool that she’ll go off to college next year and be able to say that her first bar experience was singing opera in Missoula, Montana.”

Hell yeah, that’s cool. The whole thing is cool, if I can say so semi-objectively. Unapologetically stolen, concept-wise, from New York’s popular Opera on Tap series, this performance was intended, first and foremost, as an effort to break down any sense of pretense about this new company, to immediately establish this project as an inclusive effort in a town where elitism is a sure preface to failure.

Oh, I know the performances aren’t perfect. These aren’t all Met-bound singers; nor is the Badlander a perfectly ideal place for such an event: The clanging beer coolers and odd sight-lines virtually guarantee distraction. (The day after the show, Gina will get a phone call from a self-described professional singer from Seattle, who says that the event served only to further “the destruction of opera in America.” Booyah!)

But as I watch the crowd laugh and cheer and listen, I realize: This is what I love about this town. This is why I live here.

Opera in a beer-hall? I’ll take that any day over the stuffy elitism of big-city concert halls.

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