Opera is fun and games for Toni Crowder ’93 (MM), but it wasn’t always that way.

A few years back the soprano was not-so-successfully chasing an operatic career, where talented performers far outnumbered the available roles. So she created a role for herself — as Tessitura the one-and-only Opera Clown.

Toni went to clown school, wrote a script and even learned to be a ventriloquist. Now Tessi and her trusty sidekick – a southern-talkin’ puppet horse called Wagner – are spreading the love of opera to audiences young and old. (“Tessitura” is a musical term that refers to the range of notes in a song, and Richard Wagner was a German composer known for romantic operas.)

Tessitura is a popular one-clown show that keeps schools, libraries, festivals and other venues alive with the sound of opera music. With her script set to recitatives from various Mozart operas and using themes from dozens of operas, Tessi delivers a little opera education while immersing the audience into a lot of opera fun wrapped around lively clown antics, puppetry and lavish costumes.

And since the opera clown show is up and running smoothly, Toni is again pursuing main stage roles. She will present a workshop on how to make money performing and Tessi will perform her show at the May 2005 International Classical Singer Convention in New York City. She also appeared at the May 2005 DC DIVAS concert, but she performed opera arias as Toni the soprano not Tessi the opera clown. “I won’t have on horns or a clown suit or anything,” she quipped.