Dan Frick’s chest, arms, legs, and face are smeared with green makeup, applied for his role as a speaking slave in Lyric Opera’s production of Mozart’s The Magic Flute. He also has on a truly hideous black wig, baggy orange Bermuda shorts with makeup-covered straps, and sandals over yellow socks. He’s been wearing this getup for four hours, and the emerald makeup, which is still wet from the glycerin in it, is rubbing off on everything he comes near.
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Frick has been acting since he was eight, making his living at it for the last 17 years. Recently he’s been onstage as everyone from Max in Pinter’s The Homecoming to Max in The Sound of Music; he’s also been in a lot of commercials and industrial films as well as the odd movie. Right now he’s at the Civic Opera House in two contrasting roles: the surly innkeeper Lillas Pastia in Carmen, and the burly slave in The Magic Flute. As Pastia he has to speak colloquial-sounding French; as the slave he’s called upon to make himself understood in German. He studied Spanish in school–a not particularly useful tongue in the world of grand opera–but he says other languages pose no real difficulty. And anyway, he’s well coached.
Another challenge is his body type: Dan Frick is a big guy, standing five eleven and tipping the scales at 275. That makes him perfect for a lot of roles but automatically bars him from others. When you’re hefty, he says, “people are prejudiced against you. There are so many products and programs that you cannot represent being heavy. I’m never going to do a beer commercial or a food commercial. The only spots I’m going to get are as someone on a diet or playing [a corporation’s] idea of what their competition looks like. When you’re heavy, you’re seen as dumb and not very businesslike.”
“I enjoy the workout of the Lyric, because the acting here is so much bigger–we’re talking about five to six times the seating capacity [of most theaters], and you have to play to the balcony. In a 300-seat house it would be overacting, and I’d be laughed off the stage. It’s a challenge to move from a 3,500-seat house to a 500-seat house, to a 1,200-seat house, to a commercial, where an eyebrow raised is overacting. I enjoy it all–and I hope it keeps me sharp.”
