Tonya and Nancy Turned Into Sports Opera
By JIMMY GOLEN, AP Sports Writer
Mon May 1, 5:38 PM

MEDFORD, Mass. - When Tufts music student Abigail Al-Doory sought
inspiration for her opera, she looked not to Wagner's "Ring" cycle but to
the Olympic rings, where themes like power, envy and greed are plentiful.

In "Tonya and Nancy: The Opera," Al-Doory provides 18 movements on the
scandal that turned the once-dainty sport of figure skating into a soap
opera of whacking, wailing and time spent in jail.

Scheduled for two Tuesday night performances, the production portrays the
skaters not as rivals but as a pair, singing for the audience's sympathy as
the tawdry affair unfolds.

"I think they had a lot in common, which is what we wanted to draw out in
the opera," said Al-Doory, who composed the music to complete her masters
degree. "They both figured out they had to reclaim their identities. It's a
note of hope."

More Peggy Fleming than Renee Fleming, "Tonya and Nancy" follows the lines
of "Jerry Springer _ The Opera," a London hit based on the equally lowbrow
world of daytime talk TV. Al-Doory takes the well-known rivalry between the
skaters and recasts it as one in which they both struggle to overcome
personal troubles and public perception.

"We, as a society, allowed this to happen to two young girls. They're
building up their entire lives for this moment. And who are they after
that?" Al-Doory said. "It can't help being absurd and funny because of the
situation. But it's serious.

"I really believe in the story. We're not just making fun of people. This
isn't a parody."

Even so, she'll have a hard time selling a ticket to Kerrigan, who said
Monday she'd been aware of the production but wasn't planning to attend.

"I lived it," the skater said. "What do I need to watch it for?"

She'll miss Margaret Hunter (Nancy) and Kristen Sergeant (Tonya) open with
dueling news conferences before the action flashes back to the knee-whacking
and follows them through the Olympic skateoff to their futures.

Nancy becomes a wife and mother; Harding, banned from skating, joins the
Faustian freak show that is women's boxing.

"The difference is," Harding sings, "you don't get in trouble for hitting
her."

That this is "Tonya and Nancy," and not the other way around, is no
accident. Only in opera _ or its schlockier, soapier offspring _ would a
convicted Olympic also-ran get top billing over a squeaky-clean silver
medalist.

"She is the more fascinating character. And, also, it sounds better to me,"
librettist Elizabeth Searle said at rehearsal last weekend. "I don't think
there's any way to look at Tonya's history and not feel some degree of
sympathy."

Harding never leaves the stage during the 40-minute production, which will
be performed near Harvard Square. Breaking from the made-for-TV mold,
though, she is not put on display for mockery or scorn.

The opera is a brutal expose on Harding's home life, showing her as a victim
of maternal and spousal abuse. You see her breakdown, perhaps contrived, as
she warbles, "The lace is broke!" But you also see her face contort into
real fear when her duet with husband Jeff Gillooly twists into a
wife-beating tango.

Kerrigan also comes away tarnished. But every "Why me?" has an answer of
"Why her?"

Nancy sings, "My mom is legally blind." Tonya: "My mom is legally nuts."

The casting makes the point, too: Jennifer Hazel plays both skaters'
mothers, taking the same cartoonish hairbrush she used to stroke Nancy's
brunette locks and using it to beat Harding for missing the medal stand at
the Olympics.

But Nancy is no more satisfied.

"Silver?" she repeats joylessly after finishing second.

"It's a pretty bald look at both of them based on headlines and stuff they
said in real life," Al-Doory said.

The costumes, the choreography, the scripted outcomes _ what's the big
difference, anyway, between opera and figure skating?

Verdi had his elephants; Al-Doory has Stant, the bodybuilder and Navy Seal
reject hired to knee-club Kerrigan at the 1994 Olympic trials and clear
Harding's path to Lillehammer. Gillooly planned the attack to incapacitate
his wife's top rival, but it turned her into a pariah and made Kerrigan even
more of an American sweetheart.

Armen Nercessian (Stant) played the knee-whacking as vaudevillian comedy,
dancing a soft-shoe with the collapsible baton in the place of a
white-tipped cane that Fred Astaire might have used. Then, to shock the
scene back into tragedy, he slams it into the stage.

Once the audience sees the club is for real, Stant surreptitiously swaps it
with a foam one that will allow him to whack Kerrigan without holding back.
Hunter, like Kerrigan before her, was surprised at how much it hurt.

"We didn't play the knee attack for laughs," Searle said.

Banging pianos to represent the clattering typewriters of the newspapermen
who flit from Tony and Nancy (and only briefly to Oksana Baiul, who actually
won the gold medal in Lillehammer). The chorus stands in for the skating
judges, who make Kerrigan's 5.9's and Harding's 5.5's into a Gregorian
chant.

The story is "dark and gloomy and absurd, but at the same time I was kind of
moved by it," Searle said.

Searle, who is Al-Doory's aunt and already the author of one well-received
novella about the skating scandal, was the Nancy and Tonya junkie back in
'94. She collected newspaper clips and took notes in the months before the
Lillehammer Games.

About 80 percent of the libretto, or script, was taken from actual dialogue
or newspaper headlines or the actual scores the skaters received in
Lillehammer. Searle said she made the other 20 percent up to hold the plot
together.

In the most obvious example, Kerrigan shrieks the apocryphal "Why me?"
instead of her actual, "Why? Why?"

"It's not entirely documentary truth," director Meron Langsner. "I wouldn't
think that's interesting."

Al-Doory's goal is to make the viewers rethink their impression of Harding
and Kerrigan, maybe send them away with a tune in their heads.

If she fails, Nancy won't be the only one wondering, "Why me?"

"Our adviser encouraged us to do a string quartet. I wanted to do something
with voice and a story," Al-Doory said, 72 hours before the performance. "I
really should have done a string quartet."