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FeedCelebrated tenor left acting career for opera fame
Grad honed craft at Earl Haig
Honeywell had no formal training when he tried out for the Canadian Opera Co.
OPERA SINGER ROGER HONEYWELL is booked solid for the next three and a half years.
This month, the tenor kicks off performances in the world premiere of The Letter, at the Santa Fe Opera, before taking part in Madam Butterfly at the Opera Company of Philadelphia this fall. Then he heads to the Lyric Opera of Chicago to sing in The Merry Widow, and that just takes him into the new year.
Given that much of opera is theatre, it’s perhaps not hard to believe that he began his career as an award-winning actor. At Earl Haig Secondary School, Honeywell was a theatre major, spending three hours a day working on his thespian chops.
“My life was about performance,” he recollects. He remembers starring in the school’s production of Reflections on Crooked Walking fondly.
“It was the first time that I experienced the thrill of having a lead in a show and being a part of a show that was much larger than yourself,” he says.
REPORT CARD
STUDENT Roger Honeywell
GRADUATED Earl Haig Secondary School, 1985
BEST SUBJECT Theatre
WORST SUBJECT Math
CURRENT JOB Opera Singer
After graduation, he went on to study at Ryerson University’s theatre school. Then came his first professional job, a contract with the Stratford Festival in 1988 where he remained until starting at the Shaw Festival in 1992. After five seasons he started doing voice-overs for television and film, between taking part in Theatre Passe Muraille’s The Indian Medicine Show and a rendition of Hamlet that featured Keanu Reeves.
Without any formal singing lessons, in 1998, Honeywell started performing in musicals, including CanStage’s The House Of Martin Guerre, for which he won a Dora Mavor Moore Award (Canada’s equivalent to the Tony Awards). It was during the production that he realized the extent of his vocal abilities, which led him to seek formal training in an artist development program.
“I just auditioned for the Canadian Opera Company,” he says. “They hired me as a young artist in an ensemble program.”
He had his first operatic performance with the company in 2000 and after two years went on to a similar program with the Lyric Opera of Chicago, which helped launch his career internationally. Since then Honeywell’s career as a tenor has led him to perform all over North America, which also has its downside.
“It’s my life, it’s thrilling,” he says from his home in Stratford where he doesn’t spend all that much time. “It’s [also] the most difficult part of the business. I’m on the road between 260 and 300 days of the year.”
But he wouldn’t have it any other way. “I’m not good at anything else,” he says modestly.
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