You Don’t Have to Hit a High A to get on Stage at the Opera.

The year was “1783” and Frank Frissora of Bryn Mawr and Beryl Byles of Newtown Square were about to share a first kiss in the Reichsstadt of Wetzlar, in celebration of their golden anniversary. But then they got pulled apart.  

“No, no, no!” the director shouted, as they began to embrace on the Academy of Music stage, where the Opera Company of Philadelphia had initiated rehearsals for Werther, a German composition about extramarital longing and impending suicide. “You must stand eighteen inches to two feet apart. Otherwise,” he explained, “from the audience’s perspective, it will look like you are one person.”

The kiss, at least a real kiss, wasn’t meant to be.

No, they were not really married. When they kissed they did not touch. Also, they did not speak. They did not sing.

As supernumeraries, Byles and Frissora had come to the Opera Company of Philadelphia (OCP), to be on its stage, but without the kind of triumphant talent opera requires. They were fans—great fans—and they wanted to get closer.

“My first season tickets,” Byles, an executive trainer who looks much younger than her 68-years remembers, “were way up in the rafters. The next year I wanted to be closer to the stage … and then the next year, I wanted to get tickets closer, and after three or four years, I learned about being a super. At that point I was in the second row from the stage.” These days, she is close enough to be able to see the hairs on the singers’ arms stand straight up—“It’s that physical!”

Being a super – or being part of “the great, silent majority” as OCP director Robert Driver refers to it – entails willingness, and after that, patience.

Almost every opera requires the presence of supernumeraries—as non-singing, non-speaking, prop-wielding, costume-donning, and dancing peasants, prostitutes, spear-carriers, courtesans, butlers, waiters, pastors and slaves, not to mention lingerie peddlers. Supernumeraries range from children to the retired, teachers to elevator technicians, even lawyers, actors, and Eagles cheerleaders (brought in specially for the final temptation of Faust).

Aida, an opera that calls for an army, is one of the most supernumerary-populated productions.

“You need fifty, sixty, seventy people,” Driver explains. “They need to be able to wear Egyptian costumes, which means very little, so they have to have the appropriate bodies.” Driver says he called a friend at Drexel, “I want your students and I want the ones who go to the gym.”

And so he had his Theros’ Army.

Supernumeraries, generally, are opera buffs, though that’s not true for all. The common thread might have more to do with the limelight.

“Maybe,” Frissora muses, “there’s a ham in all of us.”

Frissora, a retiree who owns several office buildings, has been a staple of the super scene since ’95, and since has become, according to Supernumerary Captain Allan Spulecki, “our biggest cheerleader.” Besides participating in almost every production, Frissora runs the website TheOperaStage2.com, where he posts an endless list of supernumerary anecdotes and snapshots of costumed supers, including several of himself in his proudest role, Head Waiter in La Boheme, where he poses with the divas themselves.

“It’s absolutely fun!” he says of the experience.

The money is nothing. In fact, the running joke is that the pay—$10 for every time you show up—doesn’t even cover the cost of parking. And then, there’s the patience factor.

“It’s hurry up and wait,” Spulecki explains. “Can you show up for rehearsal on time and then wait until we need you?”

So where does the leap happen, mental and otherwise, from the second row to standing under the lights?

Costuming helps.

“When you go for a fitting and they’re very deliberate about wanting it to look good on your body, the attention is very alluring,” Byles says. She remembers her days as a prostitute in Manalisco, when the costume designer decided she needed to look more beaten up, and began adding bits of tattered lace to her costume—the fun of that. And then, Salame once ordered Spulecki, a landscape architect by day, who was the executioner that night, to cut off John the Baptist’s head—and he did, in a gold lamĕ mini skirt, with harness.

Getting beers afterwards, as is tradition, helps—and if you try to leave cash on the table, legend has it Frissora will return it to you creatively, onstage.

“Maybe,” Byles says, “one of the appeals is that so much in life is about trying to impress others, fitting in and making sure that we’re minding our P’s and Q’s. Onstage is the opposite. You go for broke.”

Alas, Frank and Beryl didn’t kiss and they didn’t sing. But they almost did—sort of.