God blessed the Baldwin sisters with outstanding voices. He also fixed them into separate vocal ranges, so while they might look alike (when directors aren’t lopping off or bleaching their coffee-colored locks), they sound completely different. Jennifer is the soprano ingenue. Christina is the sultry mezzo-soprano. This prevents them from competing over operatic roles, since sopranos get all the girly parts and mezzos play seductresses and adolescent boys. But in making a foray into other performance genres, the sisters have occasionally found themselves face to face at auditions. Thanks to their shared blood, however, they have evolved into a novelty act of sorts (“a freak show, the Coney Island of sisters,” says Christina). They often find themselves sharing the stage, especially when the script calls for sisters, as it did in Great American History Theatre’s Sisters of Swing and Theatre de la Jeune Lune’s Cosi fan Tutte. At present, the Baldwins can be seen as a package deal in an obscure but sexy tango opera, Maria de Buenos Aires, at Theatre de la Jeune Lune. The Rake caught up with the pair to chat about the show, sisterly love, and the hard-knock life of professional theater and opera.
THE RAKE: When did you embark on your singing careers? Was there a bit of big-sister copycatting going on?
JENNIFER: I don’t think either of us wanted to be singers. I wanted to be a ballerina and Christina wanted to be a fashion designer.
CHRISTINA: We both had different diversions and interests, but we both decided at the same time to pursue music. I was in my first year of college and Jen was transferring out of microbiology into music.
Have you ever competed for the same part?
J: We both went up for a part, any part–God, just give me a part–in She Loves Me at the Guthrie. I think they had us both singing for the role of Amalia. Christina made it into the ensemble, but I wasn’t offered a role.
C: It made Jen and me think about competition, because we hadn’t been thinking about it much before. We talked about it, and we both said, “I want you to get it and I want me to get it, too.”
You both made it into Maria de Buenos Aires at Theatre de la Jeune Lune. In fact, you’re both playing Maria. How does that work?
J: We’re kind of the different sides of Maria. She’s kind of mythologized, so sheÕs a person, but she’s also every woman. She’s a little larger than life. I start out as the playful Maria.
C: I’m the lugubrious Maria. Serious. Tough.
J: But she wears down completely. She’s so lonely that her heart breaks and she dies. For a brief moment, I become the ghost of Maria. But Christina plays the Maria who dies.
Any sibling rivalry on the set?
J: It’s hard not to be sisters when the moment calls for us to be colleagues. It’s caused us to renegotiate the way our relationship works, because you can’t really take the sister part out. And we want to remain colleagues, so we really have to negotiate.
C: Luckily, both of us are talkers. We have such history. We have our shared upbringing and life in general. Often there’ll be a childhood memory, and we’ll say, “No, that happened to me! Quit stealing my memories!”
What happens when you have it out?
C: Jen’s not afraid of conflict. If something’s not quite right with someone, she is very good about telling them in a very direct but workable manner. I tend to get quiet and removed, whereas Jen will name the elephant in the room.
J: I might be direct in conflict situations, but I think Christina uses humor more effectively than I do. That’s her way of working through relationships. She disarms people.
C: I grab them and throw them down to the ground and then I take their weapons away.
Maria de Buenos Aires runs through March 26 at Theatre de la Jeune Lune, 612-333-6200; www.jeunelune.org
Leave a Reply