Ben E. Green '06

The path to directing an opera with as high a level of intellectual and moral gravitas as Francis Poulenc’s “Dialogues of the Carmelites” does not usually start amidst a musical complete with animal suits, an ugly duckling, and an exclamatory one-syllable title.

Yet “Dialogues” music director Ben E. Green ’06 steadfastly resists categorization. Not only did Green, a classically trained pianist, begin his directing career supervising a high school production of “Honk!” he has also been involved with organizations as diverse as the Gilbert and Sullivan Players, the Harvard Pops Orchestra, and the Hasty Pudding Theatricals (HPT).

Green’s eclectic tastes have even come to dictate his daily routine over the past few months. He has spent his daytime working on the score for this year’s HPT show, “Some Like it Yacht,” even while immersed in the work of directing “Dialogues” at night.

The opportunity to exercise creative control over a popular production has made working with HPT one of Green’s favorite experiences with musical theater at Harvard.

Green recalls one meeting during which the popular ballad “Unbreak My Heart” started playing on the radio while he and others were discussing the show.

“Someone said, ‘wouldn’t it be funny if the shark’—there’s a shark in the show—‘got up and sang a power ballad at the end?’ And just like that, it happened, and now it’s a huge part of the show and thousands of people are going to see it.”

But directing an opera as serious as “Dialogues” is not entirely without its comedic moments. Green describes the logistical problems of how to stage the execution of the nuns that concludes the opera.

“We spent 20 minutes trying to figure out how to make sound of a guillotine on stage...Here we are working with this horribly tragic scene, and we’re having tons of fun trying to figure out how to make the noise,” he recalls. “The most creative suggestion involved a cleaver, a cutting board, and heads of cabbage. In the end we finally settled with scraping a music stand against an iron pole.”

Green refuses to class one musical genre as superior to another, and rejects the attempts of those who do.

Instead, Green prefers to focus on the essential similarity between opera and musical theater. He emphasizes that an open mind is all that is needed to appreciate opera, and views musical theater as the further development of operatic technique. According to Green, “A lot of modern musical theatre...[draws] on elements from the operatic tradition... some to the point of being sung through with what might be thought of as recitative and arias.”

In keeping with his tradition of unconventional approaches, Green plans to eschew the typical Harvard path of law school or finance to continue working in the area about which he is most passionate: music. And even though he’s not quite sure where this decision will lead him, that doesn’t seem to matter much.

All that is important, Green insists, is “working with new music, whether written by me or someone else...it’s important to me that it is a live tradition.”

­—Margot E. Edelman