They were made for Mario music — and each other

David Renzi

Thursday, April 17, 1997 | 11:59 a.m.

A friend once told Sheila Wormer, "Mario Lanza could sing me the phone book."

Such is the esteem in which the late tenor's voice is held.

"The thing Lanza had," says Thomas Chambers, Wormer's husband, "was this beautiful tone. I've never heard a male voice that had that quality, that sheer beauty."

The couple can sing his praises forever, but they're just as apt to sing his repertoire as La Stella Duo ("The Star Duo").

Chambers, a tenor, and Wormer, a soprano, perform together and separately in all manner of operatic settings, but their tribute to the Italian singing star has given them a larger identity and another source of income.

And to think it all started at the behest of a friend.

"As a fluke," Wormer puts it.

"Yeah, it started as a fluke," says Chambers, explaining the chronology.

In 1993, they accepted a promoter friend's invitation to sing some arias at Festa Italiana, a yearly Italian festival in Seattle (where they reside), and the response led to an invitation to return the next year as headliners.

"The guy said to us, 'Too bad you don't have some kind of gimmick we can really publicize.' Well, the two of us talked about it," Chambers says. "We're both big Mario Lanza fans -- he was very influential to us about pursuing music -- and we thought, 'Why don't we put together a show on the life of Mario Lanza?'

"We literally threw this together that first year (1994) in maybe two weeks. We didn't really take it seriously, and I couldn't believe it when we got there."

Two-thousand people showed up to the 500-seat theater in which they were appearing, and a 45-minute show with a 15-minute encore went much longer.

"The people kept us there for an hour and a half doing encore after encore," he says.

"As soon as the show was over," Wormer says, "they hired us for the next year immediately."

In its present form, the show runs 2 1/2 hours with intermission and includes more than 30 of Lanza's classical pieces and popular songs.

"It's a lot of singing when you consider it's only two of us singing," says Chambers, adding that they sing everything in Lanza's key.

Adds Wormer: "One of my best roles is 'Madame Butterfly.' It's one of the longest roles written for a soprano, and I don't think I sing as much in that as I do in this."

Even in a three-hour opera, Chambers says, a singer is probably on stage for no more than 15 minutes at a time.

"In a show like this, you're singing for two hours straight. Every song is like a big aria."

"The only time you're offstage is when you're making a quick costume change," says Wormer, adding that with six or seven changes "we don't even get a rest when we're offstage. We've made it hard on ourselves."

'Listening to God'

Chambers says that when he began to listen to opera, he wanted to sound just like Lanza.

"It was like listening to God."

Although he has developed his own voice over the years, Chambers thinks his "weight of tenor voice" is similar to Lanza's. That is, the ability to sing operatic and pop material.

"I grew up in a middle-class American family," he says. "Both Sheila and I grew up listening to music and musicals and operettas. I can sing the material naturally, like Mario. One thing that is missing in a lot of the performances you see by classical artists who do crossover is, they sing opera wonderfully, but when they sing in English and try to sing Broadway or pop tunes, it sounds stilted."

"They haven't changed the style," Wormer adds.

"So, when people say, 'You sound just like Mario and Kathryn Grayson,' it's because we grew up with that music as well as studied opera. We can make that crossover very naturally, as did Lanza."

Alice Cooper?

Wormer can't remember a time when she didn't want to sing. She recalls tagging along with her mother when she brought her older sister to "cherub choir" practice and throwing a fit because she wasn't old enough to join.

"I had my first diva fit at 2," she says with a laugh.

Chambers also had performing aspirations from a young age, and sang in the school and church choirs.

"As I got into high school, I went through my rebellious years, my James Dean stage where I started hanging out with a rough crowd. I was going to be the next Alice Cooper at that point."

That's when Mario Lanza saved him.

"My folks had these old Mario Lanza records, and for some reason I started listening to them. They were 'Mario Lanza's Christmas Album' and 'The Student Prince.' I don't know what inspired me to listen to them, but this is what I was going to do with my life. I was totally overwhelmed with this voice and I thought, 'This is what I want to do.'"

Personal approach

Wormer and Chambers, who married in 1992, describe the tribute as an operatic musical in which they give bits of information on Lanza's life and their own life between songs.

"It's like one of his movies," she says. "Throughout the evening, Tom is trying to get me to go out with him, which happens all the time in Lanza movies."

"It's like boy meets girl, boy aggravates girl, girl gives in," he says.

"We never really let them know (if she gave in)," Wormer says. "We were doing a performance in Canada, and around the fourth or fifth encore, someone from the audience yelled, 'Hey, did you ever go out with him?' I took the microphone and said, 'I married him.'"