Orlando mezzo-soprano Michaela Wright sings a recital with a feminine focus at Timucua

Hark, all ye classical music aficionados who yearn to hear some Handel other than "Messiah" this holiday season! Orlando-born mezzo-soprano Michaela Wright is offering an escape from the Christmas choirs Dec. 16 with an afternoon solo recital at Timucua Arts titled Empowered. I recently spoke with Wright — who is also an educator and nonprofit digital marketing manager — about her musical celebration of womanhood, launching her arts career in the middle of a pandemic, and why she enjoys playing roles originally written for castrated men.

From an early age, Wright says, she always wanted to be on stage, wearing out VHS cassettes of Cats and Grease until her mother put her into dance lessons. "I was always singing," she says, joking. "I was the kid that came out of the womb singing show tunes." After participating simultaneously in the choir and theater programs at West Orange High School, she attended Jacksonville University with the intention of earning a BFA in musical theater. Instead, she sang classical music for the first time in college, "which was a really late start for most classical musicians, but a really fitting start for me. I actually loved it so much that I decided to change my major to vocal performance [and] then went on to get a masters, which I did at University of Illinois."

In 2020, Wright returned to Orlando to help her family care for her disabled younger sister, and COVID derailed her singing career just as it was getting started. "It was an interesting situation; I had, I think, 11 performances canceled when I graduated. I was supposed to sing Flora in La Traviata, and I was supposed to do a production of Beauty and the Beast, and it just all fell through, so it was kind of devastating." Contracts for early-career opera singers typically last two to three years, but when COVID closed theaters, Wright says the previously contracted singers were kept on for two to three years more, "so everything's kind of delayed by a couple of years" for her cohort of pandemic-era graduates.

Since then, Wright has made inroads into Orlando's opera scene, most notably playing young male "pants" roles in Opera del Sol's Hansel & Gretel and Igor Stravinsky in Nathan Felix's No. 5.

"I have a long history of playing young boys and men on stage, which is really fun. Guys get to do fun things on stage like combat," says Wright, who has a theory as to why this cross-dressing tradition is accepted by otherwise conservative patrons: The roles used to be sung by castrati. "I think people kind of glaze over it because they're uncomfortable with the roots of that, so they're more inclined to accept that a woman is now playing a man because it's better than the alternative," suggests Wright.

"I also think it's a good opportunity to say, 'maybe you're not so comfortable with drag, but that's kind of drag.'" Wright continues. "I don't want to insert myself into spaces where marginalized people exist, but I think it's a good conversation starter. Would you feel comfortable taking your kid to see a production of Le Nozze di Figaro where Cherubino is played by a woman? If you're comfortable with that, then you're kind of comfortable with drag, because it's really that in essence."

However, Wright will shed the pants for her upcoming performance, where she'll be accompanied by pianist Ledean Williams on songs selected for their feminine focus, starting first and foremost with Handel's "Lucrezia" cantata. Wright admits, "It feels a little rebellious to be doing Handel that's not 'Messiah' this time of year," but says she "fell absolutely in love" with the challenging work after her teacher recommended learning it. "It's the story of this woman who is really powerless in this situation; is sexually assaulted by this prince Tarquinius; and she takes her own life as a result," Wright says. "As sad as it is, as terrible and tragic as it is, there is something empowering about knowing that women have shared experiences throughout history. As sad as they may be, there's something validating about that."

As the longest piece, "Lucrezia" anchors the program, but Wright says she was inspired — in part by her work with the New York City-based activist orchestra Protestra — to surround it with "a whole recital of women-empowering pieces, whatever that may mean to me specifically." The intersectionally aware selections include Debussy's settings of the Sapphic "Songs of Bilitis," which Wright says are about "falling in love, and then falling in love with oneself enough to say, 'I've grown out of this relationship'"; as well as a song by Dead Man Walking composer Jake Heggie, who "writes these love songs to women's voices."

You can't put a price on empowerment, so admission to Wright's show will be by optional donation, but you need a free RSVP to attend. And if you miss her in person, keep an eye out for @mezzomichaela on social media, where she helps groups like Central Florida Vocal Arts spread the good word about themselves. "As artists, I think oftentimes we feel like, 'Oh, gosh, I have to ask people to come to another thing,' but people are really interested in what artists are doing," says Wright. "I want to empower other artists to feel good about marketing themselves as well."