No strings attached

GUYS AND DOLLS Pagliacci strikes a wooden pose, as controlled below by the Snyder brothers.

An austere, unremarkable government building sits on a bleak strip of suburban Rolling Meadows. A clump of people, ranging from the very young to the very old, squeeze into an elevator and descend into the basement. The doors slide open to reveal, miraculously, an opulent yet kitschy opera house peculiarly shrunk to the size of a living room. Vintage posters of bygone operas line the walls. Overhead, gold-leaf letters read NOT ONLY FOR AMUSEMENT. The one thing spoiling the Opera in Focus effect is a shabby drop ceiling.

In 1937, Danish-born restaurateur Fredrick A. Chramer purchased the Chicago mansion of widow Constance McCormick and converted the sprawling house on the corner of Rush and Ontario Streets into a Scandinavian eatery, the Kungsholm. At the start of World War II, Chramer installed the Kungsholm Miniature Grand Opera in an upstairs room. In 1943, William B. Fosser, an aspiring puppeteer from the West Side who put on shows for friends, began working at the Kungsholm at age 14.

After Chramer’s death in 1957, Fosser opened Opera in Focus in a rented storefront on the North Side, performing operas with 16-inch puppets he’d designed as a child. To support his passion for the dying niche art, Fosser worked as a set designer and decorator on Hollywood productions in the Chicago area. While Fosser worked on movies such as The Breakfast Club, Home Alone and Backdraft, his puppet operas became intermittent and itinerant. In 1993, he accepted an offer of a permanent home for Opera in Focus from the Rolling Meadows Chamber of Commerce and devoted his full-time attention to his dream. Opera in Focus has been performed weekly ever since; today, the 40-seat theater fills up regularly.

It seems unlikely the quaint, hand-operated theater (funded entirely by ticket sales and donations) would survive the digital era, especially after Fosser’s death in 2006. Yet he and his partner, master puppeteer Paul Guerra, mentored a new generation. Justin Snyder, a gravestone carver from Justice, Illinois, trained at Opera in Focus fresh out of high school. The 27-year-old is now the artistic director and principal puppeteer. His brother, Shayne, 28, is a freelance sculptor who joined the team after being cajoled into driving his brother to work.

“After I’d been there about a year,” Justin says, “Bill [Fosser] became sick and was in the hospital. We were performing Phantom of the Opera, and we needed somebody to manipulate the Phantom puppet, Bill’s role. So we dragged Shayne out of the workshop and put him under the stage before a sold-out audience.” In addition to puppeteering, Shayne now sculpts, builds and casts new puppets.

Opera in Focus’ backstage is crammed with props and puppet heads and plastered with hand-drawn costume designs. “You’d be surprised how many people think our shows are automated until they come back here and see actual human beings,” Justin says with a laugh.

Shunning the traditional marionette style, Opera in Focus’ rod puppets are manipulated from below. The crew slides on rolling stools beneath the stage. The exquisitely dressed puppets (the prima donnas sport painted fingernails) mouth abridged acts by the likes of Puccini, Verdi and Gounod. “We select pieces from our collection of vinyl records, then have them digitally converted and touched up in a studio,” Justin says. Recently, the Snyder brothers have added snippets of English-language musicals like West Side Story and The Wizard of Oz, hoping to appeal to the kids in attendance.

“The first thing I learned from Bill,” Justin reflects, “is how to turn myself off and adopt another persona. In my day-to-day existence, I’ll always be Justin Snyder. But here I can be an old Gypsy woman, a Chinese prince or the devil himself.”

Opera in Focus runs every Wednesday, Saturday and Sunday at 4pm, with 1:30pm weekend matinees. “Halloween Spooktacular” runs through November 8.

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