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2008



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Jan Padover

You’ve undoubtedly seen him in the canteen, sketching away furiously, as you pass by during a scene change or the end of your onstage shtick. Or perhaps he’s given you a warm greeting and a lift in one of the lobby elevators as you ascended into your seat in the Heavens (or the Balcony as it’s known around here). Or perhaps you’ve enjoyed his comic book, An Opera Comic, or his La Bohème Advent Calendar. But I am getting ahead of the story…

Behind the genial personality is a musician and an artist of rare talent and range, whose devotion to the San Francisco Opera began well over thirty years ago when his father, who served as a stationary engineer at the War Memorial (lighting, mechanics, A/C, plumbing) from 1966 to 1981, would invite his young son in for a peek at what was happening both on- and backstage.

Jan (pronounced “Yahn”) was born and grew up in San Francisco, in what he describes as “the artistic community of Portrero Hill in the ’60s.” He next lived in Sweden for seven years, where he studied art (a small language problem enrolled him in graphic design when he thought he would be studying fine art etching). Shortly after he returned, his father happened to hear that the House needed an elevator operator for Nutcracker, which Jan thought would be a good gig for about a week, but has turned out to be his “day job” and studio for twenty-five years.

To this day, Jan is a classical oil painter, particularly in the Romantic “Orientalist” tradition (think Delacroix, Dulac, Gérôme, Ingres) and occasionally teaches art in high schools. He finds himself drawn to depicting the cultures of North Africa and the Middle East, where he has traveled and is also actively involved in those cultures as a percussionist, often playing for the Palestinian, Jewish, and Assyrian communities in the Bay Area. (His main axe is a drum called the dumbeck.)

 

A Girl with a Gimbris  36" X 24" Oil Painting by Jan Padover ©2001

Jan’s advent calendar, a three-dimensional work portraying both historical and contemporary Opera stars behind the windows of Bohème’s Act II (set on Christmas Eve), came out in 1984 and has just recently sold out.

Jan had an epiphany of sorts one day in the elevator after he had been standing in the back of the House listening to an audience member loudly unwrapping candy and chattering away during a performance and, understandably, imagined the singers wanting to murder her. Instead, he channeled this fantasy into An Opera Comic, a witty, engaging Gilbert & Sullivan–esque parody of the types inhabiting the stage and the pit, and addressed to misbehaving audience members. Divas, tenors, conductors, choristers, and Supers have their turn in the spotlight, but “as each chapter had to outdo the previous one, I put Supers last, the best of all.” However, he’s a bit worried we will “come after him,” as he captured our foibles so brilliantly, having so often observed and overheard us in the canteen. (Click on the cover at right for some sample pages.)

Jan also has several fine decks of playing cards for sale on his Prospero Art Web site: Shakespeare Quotes, Shakespeare Insults, Alice in Wonderland, and The Rat Pack, the last named due to his business partner, Rick Ellis, who is a Sinatra impersonator by trade. In fact, they are currently collaborating on a Sinatra/Shakespeare musical, Chairman of the Bard, to be sung in fluent 1930s Brooklynese and intended, at least for now, as a CD and comic book. Jan is also currently at work on a set of Nutcracker playing cards. Many of his paintings are available as notecards.

Of course, aside from a free “studio” and income, Jan’s job allows him to spend his evenings in the presence of grand opera. He believes that “Great opera anyone would love, but many people only get exposed to mediocre opera. Opera has the most problematic chemistry in all the arts, only as strong as its weakest link, which could be stage direction, singing, whatever.” But when asked which ones have “rocked his world,” Jan named the Gavanelli Rigoletto (2006)—“it so surprised me I dropped my drawing and went into the house every night”; the 2000 Parsifal memorable for its futuristic, intergalactic staging (“I came out humming the lighting,” he remarks); ” and Domingo’s 1987 Hoffman with its Tiepelo-inspired stage design. Of late he has become enamored of Händel, as personified in Swenson’s Semele (2000) and the “Mafia-inspired” Alcina of 2002.

No reader of the Spearhead should be without The Opera Comic. Please visit his Web site and do say “hi” when you see him, if for no other reason than to show we’re not really “coming after him.”