Almost A Diva

You don’t look like an opera singer.”

That’s what the kids tell her and it makes sense. The only opera singers most of them have seen are of the Looney Toons variety--zaftig, with a horned hat and a vibrato you could drive a Mack truck through. But even taking into account the multicultural, multifaceted appearances of real opera singers, the kids are still right. With her long dark hair and lanky grace, Suzanna Guzman looks more like a folk singer than a mezzo-soprano. She’s 5-foot-8 and slender enough to look taller; her laughter is sudden and loud, and she talks faster and more exuberantly than a teenage girl who’s just discovered the narrative form. Stories and observations, memories and wry asides, hopes and dreams and plans, all fleet and often non sequiturs, rise and dart about her like accidental notes.

So if the words “opera singer” conjure images of velvet-trailing, bonbon popping, fan-snapping petulance, then Guzman would seem a poor impostor. Especially when she’s singing Natasha in an operatic rendition of “Bullwinkle,” which she did last year as part of the Los Angeles Opera’s community outreach program.

The audience--public school students--liked it. They just had a hard time believing it was opera. Or that Guzman, who at one performance upbraided a few tough-guy hecklers in Spanish, was anything more than one of them pretending to have this fancy-schmancy job.

“Being Latina, I look at these kids like they’re my cousins,” she says. “I want to startle them enough so they can open up that part they keep so closed off. I want to show them that being creative takes courage too.” And anyway, it was neither the first nor the most egregious case of mistaken identity she’s encountered. When she was singing with the Metropolitan Opera in New York nine years ago, she would hang out during the day with some of the neighborhood kids. In the evening, “the Opera would send a limo, and I’d come down the stairs in my gown and hair up and the jewelry, and these kids would stand there watching and their mouths would drop open. They were so impressed,” she says. “They thought I was the fanciest, most successful hooker they’d ever seen.”

Don’t get Suzanna Guzman wrong. Behind that sense of humor is a serious resume. An associate principal artist with the Los Angeles Opera for seven years, she performs regularly at the Music Center. This season alone she sang in “Falstaff,” “Fantastic Mr. Fox” and “Madama Butterfly.” Last year, her performance of “Carmen” at Houston’s Grand Opera so electrified audiences, it won rave reviews in the national press. She has performed with companies around the world, including the Metropolitan Opera in New York and the Washington Opera, and at the Edinburgh Music Festival and the Dresden Music Festival. She is, says Peter Hemmings, general director of the L.A. Opera, “a splendid artist of national importance.”

“She always makes her characters very interesting,” says Times music critic Mark Swed. “Some singers still just stand and sing. She really understands how to use the stage.”

But Guzman remains a satellite that circles the white hot core of supernova singers. Despite her impressive resume and the kudos, she is not yet an international star, not yet a diva.

To become a diva requires that magical alchemy of voice, emotion, acting ability and force of personality. To become a diva, one must also sing lead roles at the leading operas--New York, Chicago, San Francisco, L.A., which Guzman has not yet done. To become a diva, it helps if one possesses single-minded, unencumbered freedom.

Which Guzman does not.

She is the single mother of 6-year-old Conor. She is a devoted daughter and sister. Each of these states of being requires energy, requires time, requires a sense of balance. The blinders one must don along the solitary path to superstardom would make Guzman’s life impossible.

And unacceptable. Without her family or her sense of community, without her sense of priorities and perspective, without her generous energy and ability to laugh, she’d just be another opera star who, when mistaken for a hooker, would simply snap her fan, turn on her heel and stalk away.

And how badly does the world need another diva?

*

Suzanna Guzman is a native Angeleno, but not in the program bio sense, with its implications: Well, yes, she was born here, but only because she had to be born somewhere, and now she is more a citizen of the artistic world. Guzman is a native in the tribal sense--she was born and raised here; her grandparents and mother died and are buried here. Her father, two sisters and many aunts, uncles and cousins still live here. She owns a house here; her son goes to school here. She is virtually addicted to community outreach work--this month she will begin a series of 10 concerts around Southern California for the Da Camera society, and she continues to host “L.A Opera Notes,” now in its second season Sundays on KKGO Classical 105.

She boasts that she can see her childhood home from the second floor of the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, and it isn’t a big exaggeration. The hills of East Los Angeles are visible even on a smoggy day.

“My mother never called it East Los Angeles,” Guzman explains. “She called it North East Los Angeles. If you get north of the 10, you’ve made it. The Beverly Hills of El Sereno.”

Guzman, who’s in her early 40s, is narrating what she calls “the boyfriend tour” of her old neighborhood near Cal State L.A., navigating her decidedly unoperatic maroon Volvo sedan and hailing each landmark with fondness and familiarity.

It’s a hillside neighborhood, veined with bungalowed streets and cul de sacs. Now mostly Korean, it used to be exclusively Latino. “It was all families like us,” she says. “All the kids spoke English, all the parents spoke Spanish. That was back when no one wanted to be considered Mexican.”

Guzman’s parents--her mother was a homemaker, her father the first Latino captain in the Los Angeles County Fire Department--refused to speak to their children in their native tongue, so Guzman didn’t learn Spanish until high school, when she spent a year in Spain.

“Up until then, I’d been learning French. Very useful. Then I got this opportunity to study in Spain when I was 16--my music teacher was going--and so I learned Spanish, Castilian Spanish. When I came home, people mocked me for speaking the ‘wrong’ kind of Spanish. I’ve learned the ‘right’ kind since then.”

Guzman stops to admire the street where she lived, with the kerchief-small lawns, the carob trees, the lines of winter-clipped roses and ivy, all splashed against the tawny hills crowned with scrub and the smell of faded heat.

“We knew everyone on this street and the next, and the next, and the one after that. That’s what I’d like for my son.”

It is a restrictive wish for an artist, the desire for a home, for suburban stability. There is something about stardom that precludes sanctuary. Guzman gazes off into the middle distance, not so much wistful as aware. Then she shakes herself out of reverie and the tour continues.

“There it is, the rec center,” she announces, slowing almost reverently, passing the tennis courts and the main building of the El Sereno Rec Center. “It wasn’t so fancy when I was little. But, oh my, see that door there? I can’t tell you how many times I ran out of that door in costume. Oh, we had plays and festivals and parades, May Day and Christmas. The whole neighborhood would come. I loved it.”

The rec center is ground zero for Guzman’s career. Because as the story goes, she wanted to be an actress. And a rock singer. In fact, when she returned to Los Angeles from her year abroad, she joined a rock band. She was dating the guitarist and singing lead. Well, sort of singing. The kind of singing that sooner or later leaves one with little or no voice.

Since muteness was not an option for Suzanna Guzman, she took a friend’s suggestion and consulted a voice coach.

The coach proved helpful, stretching Guzman’s voice, enriching it. So when she gave Guzman the Habanera from “Carmen” to sing and told her a friend was coming by just to observe, Guzman thought nothing of it.

“She tricked me,” Guzman says. “Totally. This guy was from an opera camp in Arkansas and this was an audition. I had never sung opera, I didn’t even know what it was. But he cast me as Carmen, and off I went to Arkansas. I was 18, buoyed by the confidence of absolute ignorance.”

“Oh, wait,” she says again, slowing near the intersection of Whittier and Eastern. “There’s my Dad’s fire station. Well, not the first one, the first one is gone. But he was there for years. It was always a real solid moment for me to see my father come out of there in his uniform. And,” she adds, “it’s the station they used in the beginning of [the TV show] ‘Emergency.’ ”

After opera camp, Guzman enrolled at Cal State L.A. but did not graduate. She turned to community theater and took a job at San Diego’s Old Globe, performing in children’s productions. One thing led to another and soon she was taking chorus roles in musical theater. “But my voice was too loud, I was too tall, I took up too much room on the stage. It was, ‘Who’s the Amazon on the left?’ ”

At age 20, she began singing in competitions sponsored by various operas. “For the money,” she says. “I knew I was good enough to place in the top five, and some of the contests pay, like, $5,000.” Then--and she makes it sound as if it were entirely beyond her control--she won the Metropolitan Opera regional auditions in 1984 and 1985; the second time she was offered the chance to go to New York for the finals. Although she didn’t win, it was the beginning of a metamorphosis from musical theater Amazon to mezzo-soprano. Hired on the spot by the director of the Washington Opera, she spent several years in the Capital singing supporting roles; then she switched to regional operas. A performance at Carnegie Hall wowed critics and caught the attention of the Metropolitan Opera, where she worked for two years.

“The first year was great,” she says. “But the second, they would only [continue to] cast me as second leads or understudies. I wasn’t progressing. I was ready to slit my wrists.”

Instead she struck out to regional stages again, finally landing in Los Angeles where Hemmings had just established the associate artist positions, which guarantee participants a certain number of performances each season.

*

In the dressing room she shares with fellow mezzo Stephanie Blythe, Guzman submits to the ministrations that will turn her to a merry wife for L.A. Opera’s production of “Falstaff.” But not quietly. She missed a week’s rehearsals because of a cold and she got a Conor story out of it.

“I told Conor that he was going to have to listen to me very carefully and do what I said the first time so I wouldn’t have to yell. But of course this doesn’t sink in, so after I’ve had to yell, I say, ‘If I lose my voice, I won’t be able to sing, and do you know what that will mean?’ And he thinks a minute, then says, ‘No more roses?’ ” Guzman pauses, professionally, to give the laughter a little room, a little time. “My son, he thinks I sing for flowers.”

If pressed to name the accomplishment for which she is most proud, Guzman doesn’t name a performance, role or a company.

“I breast fed that kid for more than a year,” she says, “and I only used cloth diapers. And we were living out of hotel rooms. I still pat myself on the back for that one.”

Having broken off with Conor’s biological father before she knew she was pregnant, Guzman has been a single mother since Conor’s birth. “I know I was very much meant to have him in my life,” she says. “I tell him, ‘God really wanted us to be together.’ ”

Guzman shares her Pasadena home with a close friend, Mark Cardiff, and Conor has an enormous extended family, some related by blood, others by affection. But Conor and his mother are rarely apart, despite her plane-hopping schedule. Many singers leave their children with their spouse or a nanny while singing on foreign stages. With the help of her aunt, Guzman simply takes him with her.

“He’s been on a plane 98 times. He’s been to Europe seven times.”

This is said with a mixture of pride and frustration--Conor’s often nomadic existence is a far cry from Guzman’s own urban/suburban childhood. And negotiating the future is going to be even more complicated.

An opera singer is essentially a freelancer, paid by the performance with virtually no benefits. If, as happened to Guzman two years ago, she gets sick on opening night, she does not get paid, no matter how much rehearsal time she has put in. Every performer has a personal fee, based on experience and her place in the musical hierarchy--mezzo-sopranos earn less than their soprano or tenor counterparts, but a top mezzo can bring in as much as $12,000 a performance. For her outreach work, Guzman makes about $300 a performance; professionally, she has made as much as $6,000.

“I am so grateful to be an associate artist,” she says, “because it means I always have work here.There aren’t a whole lot of guarantees. But this is my home.”

Guzman’s other home is full of framed pictures and masterpieces of Kleenex and finger paint and construction paper. Yes, there is a baby grand where the dining room table might be, and yes, there is an enormous bouquet of roses in one corner, but there is also a plastic dinosaur or two lounging on the front stoop. Like her mien, her car, her back story, it’s an unlikely house for an opera singer.

She offers up photos of her sisters, her mother, her father’s entire family with the eagerness she showed on the boyfriend tour. She tells of one sister’s lifelong battle against diabetes, of the miracle of her kidney and pancreas transplants.

She tells of running into her cousins backstage at the opera, where they were working the curtain. Of family get-togethers in her father’s backyard. So many ties that sing in the breeze, pulling at her gently but inevitably. But the telling, and the ties, all lead back to Conor.

“Of course it’s not all bad, being an opera child,” she says. “I was singing at a benefit and I took Conor, and Graham Nash was there and he sang ‘Our House,’ and that was pretty special for us. Because ours has always been a full house, a full family.”

as accidental as her career path sounds, as many are the ties that anchor her to the world of preschools and surgeries and houses with enough storage space, Suzanna Guzman is an artist who believes passionately in what she does. For many reasons. She loves the fact that opera allows her to give back to the community that nurtured her. When she talks about the outreach work, in the schools and elsewhere, there is a wide-eyed, dramatic-gesture-making earnestness. “I really believe that I, that my art, can have a true impact on the world my son lives in,” is spoken with the sincerity of a really good public service ad, spoken that is, for the audience, for the recalcitrant teens slumping in the back row.

But when she talks about the music, about singing the music, about playing the roles, her voice lightens and she loses that mid-audition eye contact, raising her gaze instead to a personal horizon that dwells somewhere above the earth but just below the afternoon sun.

“My most precious moment in all of opera is when Butterfly tells Suzuki to leave [just before she kills herself]. I am at her feet, saying I am not leaving, and she pulls herself up and says, ‘I command you,’ and then she becomes little Cio Cio San, and music is going, and I know, and the audience knows, what is coming. When I played it last time, I added this little bow just before I leave, and I could feel the audience, I took the audience with me as I bowed and withdrew.

“When the music and theatricality and acting all come, together, when you feel the gap between you and the audience close, it is truly divine.”

With their deeper, more mature voices, mezzos have traditionally had a tougher time achieving diva status. Most opera leads--Carmen is the most notable exception--are written for sopranos. But in the last few years, there has been a blooming of mezzo stars, the most famous being Cecilia Bartoli, creating new roles as well as reclaiming some of the more iconic ones.

“This may actually make it tougher for her,” says Swed. “Now there’s more competition, and although the roles are increasing, there still aren’t that many. She has the personality, she has the voice, it’s a question of getting the roles. There’s no set formula for success, but she needs to be singing in bigger roles, at top operas.”

David Gockley, general director of Houston’s Grand Opera, could not agree more.

“She’s a marvelously versatile performer,” he says. “She looks great, she acts great. It may not be the voice of the century, but as a package, she is very, very special.”

Again and again, her talent as actress is praised by those with whom she has worked; ironically this talent may be another obstacle to superstardom.

“She is an invaluable performer,” says Edward Purrington, artistic administrator of the Washington Opera. “The depth of character she is able to communicate over the footlights is phenomenal. But she falls in a special area, which is a blessing and a curse. The kind of role one wants her for is an unusual role to which she can bring special life, rather than a role in which only the voice dazzles.”

A second lead, in other words.

Gockley believes that Guzman could have a brilliant future, but that she faces some difficult decisions. The opera world, he says, has become increasingly free market; its singers increasingly niche-specific. “Our audience is used to a level of exquisiteness,” he says. “So a mezzo who is perfect in ‘Marriage of Figaro’ is not going to be right for ‘Barber of Seville.’ No longer can a singer attach herself to one company and let it go at that. Singers need to be able to pick up and spend six to eight weeks in a foreign city. And that is a major problem for women with children. But Suzanna has to give herself those options.”

Guzman believes she is giving herself those options. Her millennial schedule is literally all over the map. This year will include a trip to London with “Fantastic Mr. Fox,” a return to Los Angeles for “Blood Wedding” at the Bilingual Foundation, and, finally, a visit to Dallas in November for “Die Fledermaus.” She’ll go to Hawaii in January 2000, then San Diego for “A Streetcar Named Desire.” That means she won’t be back singing at the L.A. Opera until 2001-01, but then it will be, she adds “for a grown-up role, the mezzo lead.”

Conor, she says, will be right there with her “until he says he can’t stand it anymore.” E-mail and faxes make it easier for him to keep up with classmates, and he will be enrolled in school wherever they light for more than a few weeks. Leaving him behind is not an option. “He is my son,” she says simply. And if others consider this a limitation, well, as much as her career means to her, so does her ability to live a life as textured, as multihued as the music she sings.

“I look at the lives other singers have--the ones with no children, with wonderful friends they never see, and I don’t want that,” she says. “You can be singing at La Scala and no one will care because there will be no one there who really knows you. What’s exciting for me is pulling all the strands of my life together, here, in my hometown. I got to host the KCET Christmas special, my family saw me on TV, and my father was so proud. I get to use my credibility as an artist to maybe teach kids that creativity is important, that even if you don’t sing, music makes your life better--that being creative is better than being in gangs. That’s success to me.”