BusTalk

[Mr. Linsky]

As Manhattan Bus Rolls, Driver Polishes His Pavarotti

By JAMES BARRON
New York Times April 23, 2009

One famous aria after another: the operatic hit parade began as the bus pulled away from the depot, empty. “La donna è mobile” from Verdi’s “Rigoletto” was followed, somewhere on the West Side Highway, by “Nessun dorma” from Puccini’s “Turandot.”

And then the bus turned onto Clarkson Street, on the way to the first stop on the M8 line.

“This is difficult sitting down,” said the driver, Christopher G. Dolan, 51. “You got to be standing up.”

He had miles to go before he could do that — about 2.2 miles, to the end of the line on East 10th Street. There, in the shadow of a housing project by the Franklin D. Roosevelt Drive, he spent a four-minute layover in the aisle, practicing Alfredo’s half of “Libiamo ne’ lieti calici”—the drinking song from “La Traviata,” a duet.

“We don’t have anybody to sing Violetta,” he said as he faced the empty seats, “but that’s O.K. We both end up on the same B-flat.”

In the heyday of network radio, Milton Cross — the plummy-voiced announcer on the Saturday-afternoon Metropolitan Opera radio broadcasts — had a Sunday-morning program called “Coast to Coast on a Bus.” But his bus existed only in listeners’ minds. The engine noise came from a sound-effects recording.

Mr. Dolan’s bus is real. He has been a New York City driver for 27 years, starting in the Bronx and then transferring to Manhattan. You never know whom you will meet on a bus — he married one of his passengers.

There are days when the shock absorbers do not cushion the ride, and there is probably gum under some of the seats. But the acoustics are pretty good, and he finds time to concentrate. “I sit at red lights, open up a score and memorize two lines,” he said.

And his audience is enthusiastic — maybe not as enthusiastic as in an actual opera house with fans shouting “bravo” at the top of their lungs, but enthusiastic enough to applaud, even whistle.

“That’s worth my $2,” said Elaine Smalls, who boarded at Eighth Street and Avenue C.

Dorothea Quinn, who got on at Ninth Street and Broadway, was surprised to learn that Mr. Dolan had made a career of being a bus driver. “I thought he was driving the bus because whatever opera company he was in folded,” she said. “You know, it happens.”

Mr. Dolan took guitar lessons as a teenager, learning arrangements of jazz standards like — imagine this — “Take the A Train.” His father, a retired postal clerk in Queens, had sung in operas and musicals when the family lived in North Carolina. “As a kid, listening to him do his scales,” Mr. Dolan said, “I had no interest in it. And he knew that.”

That changed when Mr. Dolan was in his mid-30s. He was in a record store, hunting for a Father’s Day present. Flipping through a batch of compact disks, he noticed one by a tenor named Jussi Bjorling. He bought it and, on Father’s Day, handed it to his dad with a question: “Ever hear of this guy?”

His father’s response was, “Did I ever — he’s a legend.” That was recommendation enough to send Mr. Dolan back to the record store for recordings with Bjorling singing “Rigoletto,” “Tosca” and a recital. He was hooked.

Voice lessons and time in his church choir followed. He started as a baritone. On the job one day in 2002 — he was on the M10 then — he picked up a passenger on Eighth Avenue whom he recognized as Vincent La Selva, the artistic director of the New York Grand Opera. “I called him over, which surprised him, being recognized on the bus, and I said, ‘What does somebody have to do to get an audition with you?’ He handed me his card and said, ‘Give me a call.’ ”

Mr. Dolan did, and soon he was in Mr. La Selva’s studio, plowing through aria after aria — one from “L’Elisir d’Amore” and another from “La Forza del Destino.” He remembers what Mr. La Selva told him when he finished: “I love your voice, but you’re not a baritone. Go home and learn to be a tenor and come back.”

That sounds like polite advice from someone who never expected to encounter Mr. Dolan again.

Mr. Dolan did as he was told: he worked on getting his voice up to a higher tessitura. He is not the first singer to have done that: Carlo Bergonzi retrained his voice when he was in his late 20s. So did Lauritz Melchior, after a performance of “Il Trovatore” in which the soprano told him he was a tenor “with the lid on.” Melchior went on to become one of the best-known Wagnerian tenors of all time. So Mr. Dolan practiced and practiced. And then, in February of this year, he buttonholed Mr. La Selva again. During a layover, of course.

This was when he was assigned to the M20 line. The last stop on the uptown run was on Broadway at 63rd Street, next to Dante Park and only a few hundred feet from Lincoln Center.

“I was sitting up there, the bus shut off,” he said. “I see the guy coming out of a restaurant. I grab him — ‘When can I audition?’ He says, ‘I’m in a hurry. My office is on 54th Street and I’ve got to get there.’ I say, ‘My bus goes there.’ ” Mr. La Selva got on.

“He started driving the bus and singing arias and I said, ‘See, I told you you were a tenor,’ ” Mr. La Selva recalled. “He has a very nice voice, an Italianate quality. He needs certain things, but he has very good top notes.”

Mr. La Selva later gave Mr. Dolan another hearing at his studio. “I wanted to hear him a little more extensively,” Mr. La Selva said. Mr. Dolan said it was on his two-hour midmorning break. “I wasn’t really warmed up,” Mr. Dolan said, “but he understood.” That was just last month. Nothing has come of it yet.

He said he learned most of the opera parts he knows when he was a baritone. He figured that he could learn the Nemorino part from “L’Elisir d’Amore” in a couple of weeks. Or maybe the Cavaradossi role, in “Tosca.”

He also sings in the choir at St. Jude’s Roman Catholic Church in Hopatcong, N.J., and has become the star of a three-minute video produced by his niece, Olivia Cranin, 25, with two filmmakers, Chadd Harbold and Dan Berk.

It will have company on YouTube: A search for “singing bus driver” turns up more than 200 others. But Mr. Dolan is not entirely happy with it. His voice cracked in “E lucevan le stelle” from “Tosca.”

“Go to NJ Tenor 57” — also on YouTube — “and you’ll see me singing much better,” he said.

But not on the bus.

The video Ms. Cranin produced shows Mr. Dolan at work — singing, of course.

“I never used to sing on the bus,” he said. But one day on the M20, he and a passenger got into a conversation about how singers enunciate. He was talking about Luciano Pavarotti’s recording of “O Holy Night” and could not help singing it himself, with the same drawn-out vowels.

“Everybody said, ‘Who’s singing that?’ ” he said. “One guy said, ‘Why are you driving a bus?’ ”

P.S.; I can relate to this article because my father was quoted years ago by The New York Post as being "The Singing Surgeon of Queens" and would woo his patients to sleep with excerpts from Pagliacci.

Mr. Linsky - Green Bus Lines, Inc., Jamaica, NY


Christopher Dolan, a New York City bus driver for 27 years, is known to his passengers for singing opera.
Photo by Ozier Muhammad/The New York Times