PERFORMING ARTS : Ranging the Repertoire : Angelina Reaux sings 'what I find truth in' and pairs such composers as Satie and Sondheim. Still, she's most identified with Kurt Weill.

By Jan Breslauer

June 4, 1995 12 AM PT

<i> Jan Breslauer is a regular contributor to Calendar</i>

Angelina Reaux has tried many a musical and dramatic gambit, and she’s not about to let anyone put her in a box. An actress turned recitalist and opera singer, the soprano ranges from Puccini to Poulenc to Piaf without missing a beat.

“There’s something about me that defies a label,” says the gregarious Reaux, speaking by phone from her New York home, where she lives with her husband, baritone Michael Sokol.

“I sing what appeals to me, what I find truth in, and music that I can serve,” she continues. “People will say that I’ve ventured out, but it was no great plan. Thank heavens there is a platform for me.”

Reaux has been known, for instance, to combine such composers as Satie and Sondheim on a program without batting an eye. Her recitals are famous for their innovative eclecticism; she not only mixes styles but also orders the different kinds of songs with a logic dictated more by emotional tone than genre.

Still, even a singer as versatile as Reaux can become associated with a particular artist. And for Reaux, that artist is composer Kurt Weill.

Having garnered international recognition with a one-woman show of Weill’s songs in 1990, Reaux has more recently been performing his “The Seven Deadly Sins” (Die sieben Todsunden). Just back from singing the piece with the Montreal Symphony, she is set to perform it on the opening bill of the Ojai Music Festival on Friday, with Kent Nagano conducting the Lyon Opera Orchestra.

The strategy that Reaux brings to artists from Gershwin to Puccini also applies to Weill. She rejects both traditional recital posturing and the vamping of contemporary cabaret, preferring instead a clean and simple theatricality.

“I don’t swing from the drapes or belt out smoke rings while singing high Cs,” Reaux says. “I try to tell a story and communicate with my audiences. I try to entertain them, and entertain isn’t a word that is ever brought up in a classical education.”

Weill’s “The Seven Deadly Sins” was originally written to be performed by a singer and a dancer, as the protagonists Anna I and Anna II, respectively, backed by a quartet of male singers as the Family. The work, with libretto by Bertolt Brecht and choreography by George Balanchine, premiered in Paris in 1933, with Lotte Lenya and Tilly Losch.

In “The Seven Deadly Sins,” the two Annas leave Louisiana and go off in search of their fortune. During the course of seven years, they travel to seven American cities, and in each, are threatened by the lure of a new vice.

In a departure from the composer’s original intentions, Reaux performs both Anna I and Anna II--who, we are told in the prologue, are “really not two people, but only a single one.” She calls the piece “a perfect integration of theater and great music.”

Which is, in fact, exactly what Reaux has been aiming for in her career.

Born in Houston to a Spanish mother and a Cajun father, Reaux attended Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill., during the 1970s, where she initially pursued her interest in music.

But because casting opportunities in the music department were few and far between, she was soon diverted. “I went to school to be [an opera] singer, but within the first year, I was acting in plays,” says Reaux, 40, who recalls being pressured by her teachers and school administrators to decide between a singing and an acting career. “I had to be one or the other.”

She graduated with a theater degree and began her career as an actress in Chicago. An audition for the Hal Prince organization some years later led to a move to New York and a role that allowed her to combine music with theater, the Beggar Woman in the national company of “Sweeney Todd” in 1981.

It was her big break--although not in the usual sense of the word. During the company’s Kennedy Center engagement, Reaux fell, as planned, through an onstage chute--the one leading from the Demon Barber’s workshop--but fractured both of her ankles and feet when her boots became accidentally caught mid-fall.

During her convalescence, Reaux received a book on Italian opera as a gift from Prince. It rekindled her interest in the music and prompted her to think about shifting her career course accordingly.

“I would have been happy with a theatrical career,” she says. “But when this happened, I started thinking about classical music again.”

Once she was back on her feet, Reaux signed up for a workshop production of Gounod’s “Faust” at the Ansonia Hotel in New York. For a fee of $150, she was allowed to perform the role of Marguerite for one night. It was a good investment, particularly given the encouragement and advice she was given from those in attendance that night.

At the suggestion of a New York manager who had heard her Marguerite, among others, Reaux continued to take voice and acting lessons. Then, in 1984, she signed on as a summer apprentice at the Santa Fe Opera.

But the true payoff for her hard work after the “Sweeney Todd” debacle came courtesy of Leonard Bernstein, who had first known Reaux as an actress. Taking her under his wing, Bernstein cast Reaux in a small part in the recording cast of “West Side Story,” then asked her to assay Mimi in another of his recordings, “La Boheme.”

It was a controversial choice, especially given Reaux’s operatic inexperience, and she was reluctant to do it. “I turned him down and said, ‘Thank you for the vote of confidence,’ ” Reaux says. “But because Lenny had this will, I was cast.”

As it turned out, her first reaction was well-founded. “Everybody would think that would be the beginning, but for me it was almost a disaster,” Reaux recalls. “Everybody was looking for me to fall because they thought it was all happening too fast for me.” The 1987 recording met with mixed to negative reviews. Critics felt that Bernstein’s fresh-faced cast, including Reaux, wasn’t up to the task, especially given the conductor’s slow tempos.

Instead of a career-making moment, it was a setback. But it was a setback that was to give rise to Reaux’s true breakthrough.

Faced with a sudden dearth of opportunities, Reaux decided to take matters into her own hands. She put together a showcase for herself, opting for Weill songs because they would give her a chance to demonstrate her acting, as well as her singing, capabilities.

“Stranger Here Myself,” a 2 1/2-hour review of 23 narratively linked Weill songs, premiered in Boston in 1990 and brought Reaux rave reviews. It went on to play a six-week sellout engagement at the Public Theatre in New York and from there to tour throughout the United States and Britain.

Since then, she has been in demand for recital work, as well as operatic and symphonic engagements.

“The Seven Deadly Sins,” which she will sing at Ojai, is a work that she’s performed several times during the last couple of years. The New York Times’ Edward Rothstein called her 1993 performance of it with the New York Philharmonic, under the baton of Kurt Masur (released as a Teldec CD in 1994), “likable: vocally lithe and absorbing to listen to,” although he “also found her dramatic range too limited.”

She has also won praise for her opera work, including an outing with the Long Beach Opera as Boulotte in Christopher Alden’s 1992 staging of Offenbach’s “Bluebeard.” “Angelina Reaux makes a feminist tour de force of Boulotte,” wrote the Los Angeles Times’ Martin Bernheimer. “She musters a charming imitation of a grand operettic chanteuse.”

More recently, however, Reaux and Long Beach have been at odds. Last year, when she was slated to sing Alice Ford in Verdi’s “Falstaff,” she was fired one week before the opening, due to a dispute between the soprano and director Moshe Leiser. Long Beach Opera General Director Michael Milenski claimed at the time that Reaux had become difficult to work with, although she claimed she was the one who had suffered ill-use.

Still, the Long Beach flap--which Reaux continues to regard as an instance in which she was treated poorly--doesn’t appear to be indicative of a pattern in her career. In fact, her reputation in the music community is mostly about her command of her craft and her hallmark eclecticism.

She’s also known as a champion of American composers. “As Americans, we still feel inferior,” Reaux says. “We usually present the French, Spanish [or] German group and then throw in a Gershwin at the end. You see this in classical recitals all the time, instead of giving the [American] music the space and weight it deserves.”

Reaux wants instead to put such artists as Gershwin, and even Jerome Kern, on an equal footing with the best-known European composers. “I want to serve the music and show the audience that it should not be slighted,” Reaux says. “This is our legacy, this great American music.”

Her strategy for achieving this is forthright. “I will put ‘Mi Chiamano Mimi’ from ‘La Boheme’ next to ‘Bill’ from ‘Show Boat,’ ” Reaux says. “All of a sudden, I have woken up the audience, but they will listen to the musical values and the structure of it.”

Such extreme swings in style are seldom easy for a singer. That, as Reaux sees it, is her musical cross to bear. “I make it hard on myself,” she says. “I study every style that I do. But that’s my talent, to get to the nut of a style and interpret it the way it was intended.

“It’s more exhausting, and I have a harder row to hoe than if I just had 15 roles under my belt and went around the world doing them,” Reaux continues. “That’s what I have to offer.”