Looking forward: Norman and Bylsma ready for new season at Toledo Opera

Suzanne Rorick’s decision to retire after a dozen years of running the Toledo Opera Association was easy.

“There’s never a good time for an organization or transition, you know, but I came in at a moment that wasn’t an easy transition. And this is so much better,” Rorick said in an earlier interview. “It is a very, very timely moment for me to do this.”

It was an even easier decision about who would take over the TOA, which has been bringing professional-level opera to the area since Lester Freedman founded the company in 1959.

The reins were handed to two people who have called the Toledo Opera home, off and on, for decades: co-artistic directors James Norman and Kevin Bylsma, who, as industry professionals bring 45 years of combined experience with the company, said Rachael Cammarn, TOA director of marketing and communication, in an earlier interview.

General Director Norman and Artistic Director Bylsma are about to embark on a two-production season consisting of Giacomo Puccini’s dramatic Tosca and Rogers and  Hammerstein’s musical South Pacific.

They are taking their first season in stride.

“Running any arts group in 2024 is daunting,” Norman said, “but I think we have a great team here, and we're up to the challenge for the future.”

The pandemic hit arts organizations especially hard, and money troubles that hit major donors caused another seismic jolt.

But opera, especially, had been struggling with other issues even before the pandemic hit in 2020. Audiences were thinning, and even the old warhorses by Verdi and Puccini were not enough to fill the seats, especially with younger fans.

The stereotype that opera was only for the elite was compounded by complaints that opera and its old, creaky works are not in tune with the real world. The plots are old and tired, and the stories are steeped in misogyny and bigotry. They’re in a foreign language, and what’s up with those voices?

But the Toledo Opera had been bold in its choices during Rorick’s tenure. New pieces, including Blue and I Dream, engaged the community in a conversation about policing, race, and the civil rights movement. Verdi’s La Traviata, an opera that debuted in the mid-19th century, became a conversation about society’s view of women at the time — and now.

The TOA, Norman said, has stayed afloat.

“We are sustaining,” Norman said. “We need to grow. We've lost some corporate sponsors. ProMedica was a big one, and Toledo's struggling financially.”

But money problems persist.

“We need to get some new corporate sponsors and donors at significant levels to sustain this art form because it's expensive,” Norman said. “With orchestras, costumes and sets, and union wages and everything, it's an expensive art form.”

“We're as lean as we can be,” he continued. “I always say we're a little speedboat compared to a cruise ship. And we get a lot of things done with that speedboat. We are very nimble.”

On the rise

Norman began as a chorus member in the early 1980s under Freedman, he said.

“Lester Freedman needed guys for Aida in the spring of 1981 when I was in my freshman year at UT,” he said. “I got hooked.

He even played small parts in operas, such as the smuggler Remendado in Carmen and a street vendor in Puccini’s La Boheme, and was the lead in Babes in Toyland.

Then he left for a time, until Maestro James Meena asked him to fill a tenor role for La Traviata .

“I came back and stayed for 14 years, and then went away for a little while, and then came back.”

Even during his days on stage, he said, he grew more interested in the staging of an opera. So he watched.

“It wasn’t about the performing for me as much it was, ‘Let me watch this conductor. Let me watch this director. How do they work? What kind of sets are coming in?’ I was always interested in that portion of it,” Norman said.

He gained production and directing experience as a high school drama director, he said, and began directing at the community level. In the mid-1990s, he said, he directed the TOA’s Opera on Wheels. In 2012 he came on board part-time to direct Turandot while working his day job.

“I taught at the university for 31 years, so I always had other things going on. It became too much for a part-time job, and I said, ‘You need to bring me on full-time,’” he recalled.

In other words, he came home.

The piano man

Kevin Bylsma began his career at the Michigan Opera Theatre, now the Detroit Opera, as a pianist.

“We had three pianists on staff, and I was number three, which meant that I did the outreach stuff,” Bylsma said. “I ended up going to the Upper Peninsula in the middle of February to do shows on a Native American reservation.”

But he wanted to do more, so he left MOT thinking he would go back to school.

But, Bylsma said, Meena called the next day, saying the Toledo Opera needed him. The interview lasted three hours. Bylsma recalled that Meena offered him the job, sort of. They had talked so much the maestro didn’t even hear him play.

The offer became a firm one after the audition, with Bylsma taking the job in 1997.

“Very soon it became home,” Bylsma said.

Often, you don’t appreciate your home until you have experienced life away from it, and Bylsma was no exception.

Bylsma left the TOA and took up a post at the University of Michigan.

“So I was commuting between Toledo and Ann Arbor every day, which was a bit nasty, but it’s better than the Upper Peninsula,” Bylsma said with a laugh.

Bylsma then took a job with Bowling Green State University as an opera coach.

But in 2011, he received a phone call from Rorick, whom he didn’t remember meeting.

“She had been talking to people at the symphony, and they said, ‘the first thing you have to do is call Kevin. You need to have a chorus master. You need to have him on your side.’ She said, ‘Would you like to come back?” Bylsma recalled.

“And it was welcome back to home.”

Bylsma’s title was head of music preparation, which means “that you do all the prep for the outreach shows, for the operas, you play all the rehearsals, and you do chorus, which I love doing,” he said. “And each year that job grew more and more, and then I became the co-artistic director with Jim.”

With Rorick’s retirement, Bylsma is now artistic director. While Bylsma said the appointment was an honor, there’s an even bigger privilege.

“It’s an immense honor to work for a company that you can call your home company,” he said.

Homegrown

Norman and Bylsma had returned home, and that hominess seems to be felt by the artists, who come back again and again.

Soprano Kathryn Lewek and tenor Zach Borichevsky fell in love on the stage of the Valentine Theatre in 2017 and have returned several times since.

Brendan Boyle, a resident artist in the 2022-2023 season is returning as Mario Cavaradossi, the tenor lead in Tosca .

“He just got an agent, because we connected him with that world,” Norman said. “And yeah, we're going to have him back, because he's an amazing singer. That's our job; to help the young singer take that next step.”

It takes a connection.

“Our director for Merry Widow heard Brendan and offered him a job in Hawaii,” Bylsma added. “Word of mouth in this business, to me, is a sign of a healthy company.”

The conductors, singers, and directors often turn to the Toledo Opera to fill a role.

“That's the connection you see in all of the arts. .. they just go, ‘I worked with that singer in Toledo,’ and we'll get a call. Hey, who was that? Can you connect me? Of course, we can,” he added.

“So it's all homegrown here,” Norman said.

The future

Bylsma and Norman have no plans to put the old warhorses in mothballs anytime soon.

“Obviously, with the budgets the way they are, we have to do chestnuts. We have to do the ones that you know,” Norman said. “Gotta do Boheme every seven years. It’s a great piece, [and] it sells and Carmen sells.”

Along the way, though, he said, the company will sprinkle in some golden age musicals such as South Pacific . While Ragtime , a musical that ended last season on a high note, was a newer piece, it was still operatic in scope and in score.

Newer, more modern operas must fit the criteria.

“We're not going to do a piece just because everyone else is doing it,” Norman said. “It’s got to be something of quality. The two pieces that we've done, I Dream and Blue , are of quality and brought in the audience. But are there a dozen of those out there? No, they're few and far between.”

But the pair pledge to be on the lookout for them.

“But as soon as you know things come down the pike, Kevin and I always have our ears out. And when we think it'll be great for our audiences and our company, we'll do it, absolutely.”

The opera has scheduled two-production seasons, but Bylsma and Norman plan to go back to three as soon as possible.

“The long-term plan is offering variety to the Toledo region, you know, offering great singers, compelling stories, beautiful sets and costumes with, you know, amazing storytelling, because that's what opera is.

Right now, they’re focused on securing funding from the community and chasing down grants.

And building the audience. Norman and Bylsma said the company has made progress toward attracting a younger and more diverse audience.

Still, those stereotypes that opera is only for the rich and that language is a barrier persist.

The language barrier is a nonissue, they say, because of supertitles that scroll above the stage, even for productions in English.

Bylsma said that the cost of a ticket can be as low as $39.

“That's a lot cheaper than the Eras tour of a certain pop star, and probably cheaper than most tickets in town,” he said. “Cheaper than the tractor pull.”

And if you’d rather dress for a tractor pull than put on a tux or an evening gown, that’s OK too.

“Dress for the experience you want to have,” Norman said. “Because if you want to make it a really special night, if you want an excuse to dress up, go for it. If you want to be, you know, more comfortable, more laid back, and then that night out on the town, go for it.”

And if you’d rather dress for a tractor pull than put on a tux or an evening gown, that’s OK too.

But come and have the experience, Bylsma and Norman said, the music, the passion, the acting, the incredible human voice.

“It's a multifaceted art form,” Norman said. “We have the visual, we have the musical, we have dance occasionally, the sets, the costumes, everything coming together. I think the more people understand that, the more people will flock to come and I hope that we are able to keep this wonderful storytelling that we do,”

They urge you to come and make yourself feel at home.