Behind the Curtain at the First Ever Super Mario Opera

The Super Mario games have always done away with extrapolation in favor of mystery, especially the franchise's earlier entries. Mario's are worlds that allow players to feel as if they’re making their own decisions, demanding that you experiment and find your own way. I can remember finding a hidden 1Up in the shadows of a warp pipe once and thinking, This is a secret to everybody.

If you think converting such worlds into an opera seems like it'd be a unique challenge, or at the least borderline crazy, Jonathan Mann is here to prove you wrong, or right. The songwriter has done everything from serenading Shigeru Miyamoto in a Mario costume to uploading 1500 song-a-day tracks on YouTube, and recently premiered the first act of his Super Mario Opera at Joe’s Pub in NoHo. I had the chance to catch up with Mann a mere 72 hours before the show, when he and his cast were still floating last-minute alterations to the voice of Toad.

“What if I did a Juuulie Andreeews voice?”, asked Lex, one of a half dozen cast members hanging around Mann’s Brooklyn apartment. As you enter the space, the first thing you see is a long, framed map of the overworld from the original Zelda. It’s hung in a hallway that leads to the living area where Mann is seated on his couch, a pillow shaped like an NES controller at his side.

“I was thinking you should take it kind of geeky," Mann said. "Like, a clerical toad.”

Lex transformed accordingly: “No one gets to see the wizard.”

Mann seemed satisfied. It's been a long time coming, after all. There have been demos of the Super Mario Opera available online since at least June 2005 . The initial buzz around the idea was Mann's first real brush with something like virality. Of course, he first got funding through Kickstarter for his Song-a-Day project, which is going on 1,488 YouTube-able songs as the time of this writing.

So Mann only began seriously considering putting on the rock opera and putting together a cast about two months ago, when he begain assembling over a dozen cast members and a full rock band, which includes a sax player, all dressed as Koopa Troopas. He had some trouble getting the words out to explain how it all came together.

“This opportunity came through a really happenstance thing on the internet," he explained. "I wrote a song for a podcast, someone heard it. He’s an off broadway producer, who is also into Mario. He saw that I made these plans for a Mario opera. He said, 'Let’s do this!' I said, 'OK'".

There was no casting process; just friends willing to play along. A month later, there they were, cooped up in Mann's apartement on the eve of a sold out reading of the Opera's first Act in a sprint to the finish.

Needless to say, the whole thing is sung. Indeed, Mann recognizes that his talents are in songwriting. His ability to turn around catchy, simple songs daily has led to a number of viral hits. This is a guy who got 1.3 million views on a recording of a harmonica- and bass-saxophone duet he performed with a girl he'd just broken up with. Mann also released a tune defending Apple during that whole antennae-gate iPhone 4 fiasco. The video made it all the way up to the late Steve Jobs himself, who once screened it at a press conference.

But unlike those projects, the problem with something like the Super Mario Opera project lay in coming up with a story within Mario when there really isn’t one. So the Opera’s premise is somewhat faithful to the experience of playing the game for the first time. Without any exposition, Mario is just dropped into the world he inhabits.

"He just thinks he’s this guy from Brooklyn and, like, why is he here? What is he doing here? Its all so strange. He only sort of sets it up before,” added Mann, who then shifted into the Mario voice he'd been perfecting: “Who’s this beautiful woman who wants to marry me? What am I doing here?" And then back to his voice: "Now that he’s on this journey he’s not sure he’s up for it. And Toad kind of convinces him that he is up to it. He settles into his role. Even though it creeps him out at first, he starts enjoying the act of killing Goombas and Koopas.

“It somehow feels right to be doing this.”

It's important to remember that Nintendo is a company somewhat infamous for keeping its properties’ plots fairly thin, forgoing voice acting and unnecessary, passive exposition in favor of emphasizing a pure interactive gaming experience. Mann told me he had a tough time having his characters shift back to not having voices.

Goombas, for example "are sort of down here", said Mann in his best, dopey Eeyore-sounding voice. "I’m just gonna keep on walking.” Koopas, on the other hand, are at a high register, up at a nasally sort of Warcraft 2-esque soldier voice: "Yes sir! Whatever you say!”

It's this seemingly deep-seated passion for the game that might have you thinking Mann's formative Mario moments might color his Opera story thus far. But to hear him tell it, the joy he had when he first played Mario had nothing to do with the story. For him, what he liked most about Mario back in the day were "the things that you would discover, and how it made you feel like you were discovering them.” He recalled smashing through a brick layer, and thinking this just shouldn't be.

“It made you feel as though you were breaking the game," he added. "That you weren’t supposed to do this."

Colin Snyder, a Brooklyn-based video-game designer and Motherboard contributor, handled the Opera’s visuals. He approached the project from a less technical angle, which he found refreshing.

“Mario games have always been focussed on the mechanics," Snyder told me. "Its not a secret that Mario’s story is not the important part. That’s what attracted me to this project. It’s kind of away from the gospel.”

Snyder took cues from Super Mario 3, which some say, due to various graphical clues sprinkled through the game’s presentation, takes place completely on a theatre stage. From the curtains opening at the game's outset, to how players go "backstage" at the end of each level, the idea goes like this: What if, in Mario 3, it’s the rest of the world that's moving around Mario? What if Mario is standing in place?

As a game designer, Snyder feels that many classic games end up creating interactions which “are not purposeful, and create their own meaning later on", though he concedes that old games do evoke deep-seated thoughts and feelings. Take Pacman. He finds the classic "deeply psychological", a meditation on the "need to collect, consume, and be consumed." Something like the Mario series, on the other hand, is about "the ecstasy of movement".

An interesting estimation, perhaps, in the backdrop of the initial thinking behind Mario's profile. Shigeru Miyamoto, the legendary game designer and creator of Mario, has attributed the appearance of the gaming medium’s most recognizable icon to hardware limitations. Mario’s mustache, hat and overalls were used because at the time developers couldn’t convincingly animate a mouth, hair, arms, and legs. The character’s name has been attributed to Mario Segali, the owner of the warehouse that Nintendo of America was renting in Washington state, in the lead up to the video Game crash of 1983. Mario took Segali’s name as a concession when NOA fell behind on rent, and were hopeful they had a hot new property on their hands.

During Mario’s embryonic moments, Nintendo itself was making leaps of faith and gunning it to the flag pole. Connecting the various planets, worlds and occupations Mario has held into any sort of narrative has remained in the hands of the gaming community every bit as much as it has in the hands of Nintendo. And Snyder, for his part, cannot help but see some back story and narrative in the numerous half-hearted references present in the very first game.

“He’s a working class everyman. Then you have this very Japanese…" Snyder trailed off, "looks like an Ox, kind of. Looks like turtle demon. Then you have this back story that most of the mushrooms in the world answer to him. So you have this underclass populist vibe to him. And Mario is coming in, serving the monarchy.”

And being a capitalist, too. "He’s looking for money," Snyder continued. "He’s looking out for number one, even though its a self sacrificial kind of journey for love, at the end of the game what are you left with? He makes some money.”

He's part working-class plumber, part carpenter, and occasional doctor, a multi-faceted personality that came through in Snyder's visuals.

"He’s kind of a racist stereotype," he added. "For Italians in particular we either have Super Mario or we have the Mafia, or we have the Jersey Shore. So at the end of the day, Mario is pretty great.”

*****

Mann composed the music for Act I from the climax backwards, and said that "Lizard Wizard", which opens up the opera, is the first song he wrote from Mario’s perspective. In it, Mario chews on the things he does, wondering just why he does them over and over and over again.

By his count, it took about three weeks to compose the opera. Mann spent most of that period formulating a story that could express his crazy love for the games. He knew the music from the series’ history, which is comprised mostly of motifs and melodies originally composed by Koji Kondo in the 80s, were enough to go on. “Music is the quickest surest way to activate those parts of the brain. It just takes you right back to the playing.”

Mann admits to being obsessed with Mario songs since he first uploaded a demo on MySpace in 2003. He'd find more and more in each song with each listen, arriving at a kind of shared nostalgia that people specifically associate with Super Mario.

“I sort of longed for that magical innocence of Mario," he said, as his Toad choir reheared their lines into the ground. "It’s that shared cultural experience we brought to Mario" not unlike how what our parents broguht to the Lone Ranger, or something. As it stands, he is still tweaking the sights and sounds of the still announced second and third acts of the Super Mario Opera.

The plot, however, will likely remain faithful to experiencing the game itself. Man is exploring how the act of playing a game, this game, from the beginning every time could be a very poignant experience for Mario.

“Mario has the realization, almost like deja vu, after he’s done this whole rigmarole a thousand times," Mann said. "Think, every single time that anybody’s played a Mario game, ever, it all sort of comes flooding into his memory. And he feels the full weight of his existence. Save the princess, she gets kidnapped. Save the princess, she gets kidnapped. Kill all these things. This crushing weight, over and over again.”

He does have a firmer idea of where Mario might end up: Mario lands in heaven, and is presented with a 1Up. At first Mario will resist, at which point the player talks to tells Mario about how much playing his games has meant to her. Miyamoto might even be there, thanking his creation. "It’s where the gamer," Mann went on, 
"no, where I get to say to him, 'Mario, man. I love you.'”

So I couldn't help but ask, on my way out, if in this context Mario is Christ, Miyamoto is God, and the player is the Holy Spirit.

“There it is,” Mann replied. “Boom.”

@basimbtw