Masters of the Medley

By Josh Larsen
Naperville Sun Staff Writer

At the Naperville Jaycees’ Last Fling this past September, a strange sound could be heard emanating from one of the beer tents. Instead of the pounding drums and harsh guitar chords of a rock group or the wheezing accordion of a polka band, the robust voice of opera floated through the air.

Bringing opera to a beer tent was just another day at the office for Naperville’s Festive Singers, a local business which provides small groups of vocal performers for parties, festivals and other social events. For the next three Sundays, they’ll be caroling amid the holiday shoppers in downtown Naperville between 1 and 4 p.m.

“(At Last Fling), we were right across from a rock-and-roll band and it went quite well, actually,” said Pierrick Hanlet, a Naperville member of Festive Singers. “We were just pleased that people weren’t leaving, because you don’t expect in a beer tent to have a bunch of opera fans.”

That’s something Stacie Steinke, founder and artistic director of Festive Singers, hopes to change. A singer herself (she has a master’s degree in music and voice from the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C.), Steinke left her home in Naperville in 1995 when her husband accepted a job transfer to Mexico City. When she returned in 1998, “I saw that Naperville had become more cosmopolitan, much more of a city in its own right,” she said.

Having frequented a Mexico City restaurant with singing servers, Steinke at first thought the concept could take off here, as well.

“But it was more of a stretch, so instead I though about how opera and theater music is very portable and could go to parties or outdoor tents without mikes and move about the audience and actually sing to people,” she said. “I thought that combined with my own interest in promoting this kind of music, there would be a match for this in the Naperville community.”

And so Festive Singers began booking performance last spring, providing private programs that mixes Broadway favorites from “Show boat” with more highbrow pieces such as “Brindisi,” a toast from Verdi’s “La Traviata.”

“Even though some of this is seen as ‘serious music,’ (our performances) allow it to have a lighter side and be entertaining,” Steinke said. “You don’t just turn on the radio every day and hear this.”

There are 20 Festive Singers in all, some of whom perform as soloists and some who appear in groups of up to eight. Holiday packages include a soloists’ program (which includes two individual singers and an accompanist), staring at $390, and a four-person a cappella caroling program that starts at $480. Their programs last about one hour (either broken up throughout an evening or performed all at once) and emphasize audience interaction.

“We try to interact as much as possible so it’s not just us staring at people and them staring straight ahead,” Steinke said.

Without a stage to tie them down, the singers love to move through a crowd, often pulling aside partygoers to include them in the musical fun.

“They like it, the smile, they like getting the direct rapport,” Steinke said. “That’s kind of the beauty of these pieces – they lend themselves to any audience and situation.”

“The idea of having the audience as the stage is fun, to be able to interact,” added Hanlet, who works as a physicist at Fermilab when he isn’t indulging his passion for music. “I like winging things, and one is forced in these circumstances to go by the seat of one’s pants.”

This style of singing also has its challenges. “There’s no director, so we have to work closely together,” Hanlet said. “There’s a lot more demand on knowing the music. One can’t drop out if one doesn’t know one’s music.”

Hanlet also performs with the Mostly Madrigal Singers in St. Charles and is a cantor at Naperville’s SS Peter and Paul Church. Almost all of Steinke’s singers have extensive musical experience, ranging from the Chicago Lyric Opera Chorus and the Chicago Symphony Chorus to the Grant Park Symphony Chorus and the DuPage Opera Theater.

If the individual Festive Singers have one thing in common, Steinke said, it’s their desire “to broaden the appeal in the audience of the kind of music they want to do.

“This is memory-evoking kind of music and people really enjoy it,” she said. “You can see that they’re with you and they’re responding to you.”

“I appreciate the variety of work that we’re doing, from operatic pieces to musical theater to caroling,” Hanlet added. “My favorite thing is not choral music, and the nice thing about Festive Singers is it’s an opportunity to do opera – my first love musically – and musical theater. Opera is generally technically more difficult than musical theater and that challenge is fun.”

In addition to the downtown Naperville appearances, Festive singers also will be performing “A Dickens’ Christmas” on Wednesday and Dec. 15 at Gray’s Mill banquet hall, a historic grist mill on Fox River in Montgomery. For $35 per person, the evening consists of a traditional English dinner and a program of holiday carols.

“This is kind of our first big season,” Steinke said.

And for Steinke, a successful run of holiday performances will validate the acceptance her group found at Last Fling.

“It was fun in the sense that people come into this beer garden not knowing what to expect and no one left,” she said. “They clapped and had fun and it was a different kind of experience for everybody.”