A good guy trying to be bad

Rodney Macann's role as Germont in La Traviata is not the bad-guy type of character he usually sings. Picture / Paul Estcourt

Anyone, and this is almost everyone, who thinks opera is elitist and posh should take a peep behind the scenes. Or perhaps not. Because here we are under the St James Theatre in a grotty dressing room the size of an outhouse. There are rusty pipes on the ceiling, a puke-yellow bench and a couple of chairs no hefty tenor would approach without fear of their imminent collapse.

With its mirror surrounded by light bulbs, it's a parody of a proper dressing room in which you might encounter a star. I think Rodney Macann is a bit of a star. Although I'm not sure, because being an opera star in New Zealand is hardly like being Hayley Westenra, is it?

Still, you'd think he was if you read the stuff publicity people send out. He's the baritone who made it big overseas and who has sung with Carreras and Domingo. He's sung in all those plush, posh houses: Covent Garden, Carnegie Hall. He almost, goodness, married Dame Kiri, although of course that was long before she was a Dame.

He missed his chance there, but he did go on to become pretty famous in that name-in-lights way and he got quite rich too, so that was all right. Then he did a funny thing: he decided to become a Baptist minister.

Obviously he doesn't think this was a funny thing, but I do, a bit. And so does New Zealand Opera because they really can't resist making the most of Macann's funny other job.

"Preacher by day" and "bad boy ... by night," is how they sell Macann. I wondered what he thought of that. He hadn't realised that was the line they were pushing, but he's well used to it. He boomed away, in his baritone's laugh, which was a bit of a shock to the eardrums in such a small space.

He must be one hell of a preacher and he's probably wasted a bit on New Zealand Baptists, who don't really do fire and brimstone or altar thumping. He's quite a small opera singer, at least compared to some of those tenors, but there is still something larger than life about him - which is why I went and found him a less precarious chair.

He's in rehearsal for the NBR New Zealand Opera's production of La Traviata, in which he plays Giorgio Germont, a most unhappy gent whose son is bringing the family into disrepute through his affair with one Violetta. He says he usually sings "slightly lower and slightly louder" less lyrical roles than this one, and he often plays baddies. Germont is not really a baddie and "I took a wee bit of persuading to be convinced that it was right for me." Also, "he's quite dignified ... a sort of figure of righteousness". Which is not quite him. "No, not particularly."

He likes playing the villains and he doesn't seem to get at all irritated when people say - and they do - "how do you sing these roles?" He says: "Well, do you think every baritone is going around as ... " A murdering bastard? "Yes, absolutely. Baritones, he says, "are actually very nice people."

Macann thinks everyone is very nice. He admits to being a bit of a goody-goody as a boy, and he still is. This Baptist minister's idea of cussing is to say "crumbs".

We have quite a jolly chat about the charm of bad boys, and about how it's sometimes said that his bad guys are too good. "Sometimes people don't like it at all, they feel it's too soft-edged." He likes the bad ones to have charm, but he's also quite thrilled when he learns that he's given an audience, particularly the ladies, the creeps.

He knows the opera companies can't resist the "Baptist, baritone and (sometimes!) opera baddie" line on press releases ... And, anyway, "I wouldn't describe myself as one of these sort of pious, other-wordly people at all. Anybody who knows me would certainly not see me as that way, and it's not my view of Christianity at all.

"One of the things that interests me about Christianity is that Jesus seemed very much more at home with the bad guys than he did with religious people."

Macann remembers working with director Elric Hooper when he was playing Iago in Otello, and "Elric had people coming up and saying, 'Is Rodney evil enough?'. And he said, 'Well, what are evil people like? As far as I'm concerned they look just like Rodney Macann'." He took this is a great compliment.

He is, he says, very keen on exploring the darker side of his characters, perhaps "because of the Christian church side of my life, I'm really interested in evil, and you know, what makes us evil". I don't, actually, so I asked what he thought evil was. And he said, "Well, I don't know, but I do believe in it. I do believe there are forces. You've just got to look at the history of the world and see the huge gifts that we've got, the huge ability we've got, to solve all of our problems - short of death. But we don't, we continually stuff up."

Despite this, he says, "I'm not at all philosophical." That comes as something of a surprise, but he says he went to theological college "because I was primarily interested in helping people". He "certainly wasn't reckoned to be the greatest scholar".

All right then, here's an unscholarly question: How does one "almost" marry Dame Kiri? "Aah," he says, "we sort of fell for each other a bit" after they met as finalists in a Mobil Song Quest when he was 21 and she was 19. Did they have a fling? "Oh, in my restrained Baptist sort of way." She said on the telly once that "we nearly got married and that it would have been a disaster, and of course she was right. Oh, two singers, and I think maybe I've got enough ego to have struggled with being very much second fiddle to Kiri". He seems to have got over it; he and his doctor wife Lorna have four grown-up children.

He lived in Britain for 22 years before he came back to New Zealand to take up the job as minister at Wellington's Central Baptist Church, which he juggled with singing. He is now a consultant for the church.

I'm quite keen to know how that ego he mentioned fitted in with being a Baptist. He says it was never about fame, because almost all singers he knows live in a state of constant anxiety about their next performance, and whether they'll go out of fashion, or lose their voice. But he did quite like "all the goodies".

"I didn't think money was important, but I think a sense of status was quite important to me. I like the fact that I had my new Audi, and we had our beautiful home and half an acre of ground near London, a holiday home in Scotland, had the grand piano."

When he arrived in Wellington to take up the church job, he suddenly thought that it might not be a good look to be a rich minister, but nobody seemed to mind. I ask if he'd splurged on a bit of bling, like Brian Tamaki, but he just looked at me as though I was some sort of daft force, and said of course not. He is a Baptist after all.

He still seems to think about the money thing a bit because he returns to his attempt to define evil and says, "I guess my analysis of evil makes me realise that greed is one of the most destructive forces there is. But, of course, I wouldn't see myself as being particularly greedy. But I can look back and see, well, yeah, that is part of me."

Which sounds like another attempt to sell Macann as the bad guy. Now that's a bigger beat-up than that press release.