Sing Faster: The Stagehands' Ring Cycle

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SING FASTER: THE STAGEHANDS' RING CYCLE captures Richard Wagner's "Ring Cycle" from the union stagehands' point-of-view. These behind the scenes stars lead us through their own version of Wagner's operatic spectacle - from Rhinemaidens, Walkures and giant dragons, to poker games, smoke machines and thousand-pound sets.

"Gods are out on stage singing about the great problems of the world...We're doing all the hard work...all the small stuff. We're just mere mortals," says Ken "Spike" Kirkland, principal stagehand for the San Francisco Opera. Here begins the unusual treatment of Wagner's Ring Cycle, Der Ring Des Nibelungen, told solely from the viewpoint of the San Francisco Opera's union stagehands. SING FASTER: THE STAGEHANDS' RING CYCLE follows the crew as they perform astonishing feats of stagecraft and trade off-stage banter, offering a contemporary, insider's perspective on a strange and complex 19th-century operatic tradition.

SING FASTER condenses Wagner's seventeen-hour epic into fifty-five minutes as the stagehands operate the tricky, snapping jaws of a huge, hydraulic dragon; wade through currents of fog, smoke and darkness; and maneuver looming, thousand-pound sets. During lulls in their fever-pitched work, crew members balance checkbooks, knit sweaters and gather for a ritual poker game in the grips' lounge, just below the stage, where the talk ranges from the antics of the Wagnerian gods to Michael Jordan's hamstring. In juxtaposing the opera's physical machinery with its metaphysical meaning as seen by the workers, this documentary reveals the dynamic relationship between life and art.

Principal stagehand Ken "Spike" Kirkland lights the way with his insightful observations, making sense of the four complex, protracted dramas in the "Ring Cycle." He describes in lurid detail the fall of a decadent order of gods, compromised by their own greed and vanity: "We build the world from scratch. We'll build cities...towers...islands...build up the whole world. Then they're going to go through an entire generation of infidelity, lies, betrayal, cheating. Somebody's gonna end up dead somewhere along the line."

Ken "Spike" Kirkland

Das Rheingold - The Rhinemaidens: Ann Panagulias, Mary Mills, Sandra Walker at the San Francisco Opera in 1990.
Photo: SCHERL

Night after night the stage crew creates a majestic fairy-tale/soap-opera universe of trolls, giants, lightning, dragon's blood and magic mountains, in which the singers spin a dark tale of heroes betraying their own moral codes. Ranting and raving in their togas and winged helmets, the Walkures are an improbable counterpart to the stagehands, who sport tool belts and B-52's tee-shirts and wait in the shadows to bring Wagner's vision to life. But at the heart of the film is a surprising marriage between Wagner's Norse mythology and the sensibilities of working people at the end of the 20th century. SING FASTER is at times hilarious and at times moving as the crew speculates on the most basic of human themes: love, greed, power and redemption.

At the end of the final dress rehearsal, the opulent world of Valhalla sinks down into fiery oblivion. Outside the San Francisco Opera House an impatient opening night crowd waits for the performance. When the doors eventually open, people burst into the theater. Finally, we see the entire seventeen-hour "Ring Cycle" unfold: each elaborate, breath-taking scene in a sixty-second blizzard of time-lapse photography

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