Iraq war veteran Richard Gibson finds his voice — and gives it to the Lyric Opera

It takes about 25 minutes to dig a hole in the sand large enough to accommodate a man who is 5 feet 6 inches tall. Richard Gibson knows this because he has shoveled out what is called in the Marine Corps a “Ranger grave.” The idea is that in lieu of barracks, you dig a hole until you can lie in it on your back, your nose beneath the ground, so that if a mortar explodes nearby, the shrapnel will explode overhead. The reality is that it’s better to be lucky than a good digger.

It was March 2003 when Gibson’s unit, part of the 3rd Battalion, Fifth Marine Regiment, rolled to a stop outside the ancient city of Samarra in Iraq. In the shadow of the structure that Marco Polo once thought was the Tower of Babel, Gibson began to dig. Sweat pooled inside his chemical-biological warfare suit, but it felt good to work his muscles after spending 12 hours behind the wheel of a Humvee.

Marines aren’t trained to be idle. When everything stops, they’re like a spring coiled with tension. But he had finished the hole. “Those were the darkest times in Iraq. After I said my prayers,” Gibson says. “I said, ‘Let me wake up.’ I tried to find a happy place.”

Rather than dig himself apart, he turned to music. In a hole 9 inches deep, he mentally replayed Johan Jonatan “Jussi” Björling, his father’s favorite, singing “Nessun Dorma” (which translates from Italian into English as “None Shall Sleep”), an aria from the opera Turandot.

It’s about an hour before the curtain rises for the very first time at the Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts. It’s September 16, and the Muriel Kauffman Theatre is packed, some having paid as much $1,000 a seat for the opportunity to be the first inside the Moshe Safdie-designed building that was 16 years in the making.

Gibson, 30, is walking around backstage, stretching his legs and his voice. Gray hair sneaks in at the temples of his jet-black hair; his brown eyes burn intensely. This is Gibson’s sixth season with the Lyric Opera, but the stage is suddenly a lot larger. He catches a glimpse of Broadway legend Patti LuPone and sees a tall, thin figure who looks just like Tommy Tune sans his tap shoes. It is Tune, in town to christen the stage alongside LuPone and famed tenor Placido Domingo.

“I’m trying to be cool, but it’s surreal,” Gibson will say later. “I just want to pull up a cot in back and sleep there.”

Instead, he touches the dog tags under his pirate shirt — the Lyric Opera is performing selections from The Pirates of Penzance — and remembers that he is not just singing for himself. All too soon, the stage manager calls for places.

“As a performer that is still struggling and working, you always wonder: What type of stage is too big for me?” Gibson says.

He steps out from the wings to discover the answer.

Snow was on the ground when the Gibson family arrived in central Minnesota. The family of six had traveled more than 8,000 miles, emigrating from Grahamstown, South Africa, with just $8,000 to their name. It was two days before Christmas. Richard was 5 years old.

Soon after their arrival, Richard’s father, Hugo, took a position at Cleveland Chiropractic College in Kansas City. He left the family in Minnesota while he taught and studied for the boards, which would allow him to practice in the United States. By Christmas the following year, Hugo was able to move everyone to Lee’s Summit.

Growing up, Gibson seemed to be doing one of two things: singing or fighting. The first was by choice; the second was a result of the fact that he wasn’t one to compromise.

“He was always an intense young man,” his mother, Judy, says. “I remember when he had friends over to our house. He made sure nobody took the Lord’s name in vain. He was a really passionate young man, and I guess that’s just carried over.”

The youngest of four children, Gibson left South Africa at an early enough age that he didn’t speak with much of an accent. But bullies are never picky, their targets only having to be a little bit different. Gibson marks the passage of his childhood with dust-ups — and moments onstage.

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Miss Garnett was his music teacher when he was in third grade. She had long, curly brown hair, and he had a crush on her. He also developed a love for performing.

In sixth grade, when Gibson says he was “one fight away from being expelled,” he found his way to the choir room and rediscovered his love of singing. But the bullies followed him when he moved on to Pleasant Lea Middle School. That’s when Gibson took a stand.

“A guy came on the bus,” he says, “and I said, ‘OK, today’s the day. Let go.’ I lost the fight, but the bullying stopped. I didn’t fight again until the Marine Corps.”

Schoolyard tensions relieved, Gibson embraced singing. He was cast as a duck in a high school production of Pippin. He also spent hours in the basement with his father and the recordings of Björling, a celebrated tenor who had debuted at Carnegie Hall 60 years before. Gibson found himself in the very same spot as a member of the school choir. “The great doors opened, and there I am,” he says. “That’s why I had the dream of one day being an opera singer when I had no business doing that.”

Real life was waiting outside the concert hall, and for Gibson, that meant a rifle and a gun. Since the age of 7, when he got a Special Forces T-shirt while on vacation in Cape Cod, he knew he would be a military man. He graduated from high school in 1999 and, 12 days later, he arrived at basic training at Camp Pendleton in Southern California.

“The first day I was there, one of the drill instructors asked if anybody could knock on the door like a man,” Gibson says. “I wanted to do a good job, so I knocked the hell out of that door.”

He was made squad leader of his platoon. It’s a post you’re not meant to keep. The Marines knock you down before piecing you back together. Nobody figured out how to knock down Gibson, though. He was still squad leader when boot camp ended in August. After learning combat skills at the School of Infantry, Gibson continued his training in the Security Force Regiment, the counterterrorism unit of the Marine Corps. Six months after graduating high school, he was stationed in Bahrain, an island kingdom in the Persian Gulf.

Gibson looks in the mirror, slipping a white T-shirt over his head. A tattoo on his chest peeks out from the V-neck. It’s a figure kneeling in prayer beneath a trio of mountains. The tattoo is a reminder of what it’s like to be 18 and a grunt. “I saw myself on a mountaintop, praying for forgiveness and the men lost in battle,” Gibson says.

It’s a half-hour before the final dress rehearsal of Giacomo Puccini’s Turandot, the opera that Gibson recalled under the stars in Iraq. A cast of 122 tells the story of the Chinese princess who, not wishing to marry, subjects her would-be suitors to three riddles. They must answer them correctly or die. A mysterious prince rises to the challenge to win her hand.

In the muted-gray dressing room on the sixth level of the Kauffman Center, tenor Trent Green pulls off a bright-green dress shirt as he warms up his voice. Green is 6 feet tall and cuts an elegant figure. “I can’t believe you let me go onstage with you guys,” Gibson tells Tom Garrison, a fellow bass and a 28-year veteran of the Lyric.

Gibson heads to wardrobe for last-minute alterations to his peasant’s costume, navigating the halls in black canvas shoes.

“Chinese people wore their hats straight on,” costume designer Mary Traylor tells him. “You don’t look Chinese.”

Gibson gazes at the mirror. “I look like $15,” he says. “I’m probably the only guy the size of a Chinese guy in the cast.”

Hat straightened, it’s back to the dressing room, where Gibson dons headphones and cranks his anthem, Stevie Ray Vaughan performing “Voodoo Chile” at Carnegie Hall. This is how he harnesses his adrenaline, by putting himself in the shoes of the greats.

When the phone rang one day in 2003, Judy Gibson didn’t expect to hear the voice of her youngest child. But it was Richard, using a satellite phone that an MSNBC news crew had let him borrow. He was driving the news team in and out of Baghdad. Turn on your television, he told his mother.

“There’s [reporter] Chip Reid, and then we hear ‘Amazing Grace,’ and I recognize Richard’s voice,” she says. “The camera pans across these huge, big black guys and then it comes to this tiny, little short white guy, and there we saw the passion that he had for the Marines and for singing,” Judy remembers.

She and Hugo watched MSNBC for Reid’s reports from Iraq because wherever he was, Richard would be driving him. Gibson’s fellow Marines, meanwhile, tracked his movements a different way. “Every once in a while, you’d be walking through barracks and hearing a voice just booming off the walls,” says Francisco Quintero, a staff sergeant who served with Gibson in Iraq. “Sure enough, it was Richard, the voice.”

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Quintero is today stationed at Camp Pendleton. He has just had what he hopes is the last surgery to remove a 3-inch shard of metal from his intestine. He’s eager for his twin daughters, who were born prematurely, to come home from the hospital. Delicate moments like these remind Quintero of his friendship with Gibson, whose counsel he sought when they were in Iraq. “Richard was always in control,” Quintero says. “He knew exactly what was going on around him. He was under pressure, but he didn’t show it.”

Gibson’s service in the Marine Corps ended on June 1, 2003, one month after then-President George W. Bush stood on the deck of an aircraft carrier and declared “mission accomplished.” Gibson drove back to Kansas City in a 1989 Chevy Corsica hatchback. The neighbors had tied yellow ribbons around the trees, and his mother threw him an impromptu homecoming party.

“It was this state of euphoria,” Gibson says. “I was back and I had survived. But then, I thought, Oh, shit, what now?”

He took a job as a server at Tuscany Manor, a restaurant in Lee’s Summit. He got engaged. But six months later, the wedding was off.

“I pushed her away,” Gibson says. “I was angry. If I knew the monster I was going to become, I would have just left her alone.”

A short time after the breakup, he was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder. He didn’t want to fight. So he flew — to South Africa to track down the man who had taught his father to sing opera.

As a young man in the early 1960s, Hugo Gibson worked in the insurance business, an odd career choice for someone who liked to ride motorcycles and raise hell. One day, a colleague invited him to attend a singing class with a voice teacher named Llewellyn Hansen. On a whim, he accepted, never expecting that the following day, he’d be singing in front of a piano.

“I owe a great, great deal to singing,” Hugo says. “It offered me a way out from the kind of life I was living and opened up doors to me that would not have opened any other way.”

Hansen helped Gibson find his voice, a resonant bass that he would pass on to Richard. Before coming to America, Gibson sang with a chorus in Pretoria.

The elder Gibson doesn’t regret his eventual decision to pursue a more traditional career. “Would I have been a successful singer in the long term? I must answer no. I think I would have been one of the operatic tragedies,” he says.

But he knew what it meant to him to study with Hansen. So he wrote letters from his chiropractic office and sent Richard on a plane to track down the voice teacher. A week later, Richard was standing in front of a house in Johannesburg. Dogs stirred at his knock.

“Are you Hugo Gibson’s son? I’ve been expecting you,” Hansen said.

Four months and 62 voice lessons later, driven with a passion for singing, Gibson returned to Kansas City. He received a scholarship to attend the University of Missouri-Kansas City’s Conservatory of Music and Dance. It was there that he first met Gustavo Halley, his current voice teacher.

At age 71, Halley has a voice that still rumbles. He moves round his house in Waldo with the grace of a former athlete. Halley played baseball as a young man in Havana, Cuba, but it was his bass-baritone that allowed him to see Europe.

The man known as “Papi” to his students saw a little bit of himself in Gibson, who was 26 when he began working with Halley. “There is a sort of parallel with him and me that I understand very well,” Halley says. “I was a jock, but I had this sensitive side that made me feel different to the other boys. The ones who were sensitive didn’t know anything about sports. I felt kind of left in between, and he is the same way.”

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Under Halley’s tutelage, Gibson won a part in the chorus for the Lyric Opera’s production of Aida. It was 2006. For the first time in his life, he was being paid to sing.

“He’s someone you kind of notice,” says Evan Luskin, general director of the Lyric Opera. “He has a real theatrical side and he just knows how to handle himself onstage. He has a wonderful, wonderful deep voice, and given his background in the Marines, he knows how to march. He really looks the real thing.”

Gibson still had a lot to learn about his own voice. He struggled in his performance-based courses at UMKC. The metronome chimed his failure in perfect tempo.

“My anxiety came back, and I was straight back in Iraq. There, if I screwed up, people would die. It was very difficult to try and get out of that,” Gibson remembers.

He lost his scholarship but not his resolve. Just over a year ago, Gibson left school and moved in with his older brother, Donald, also a former Marine. He sought out counseling whenever he felt himself withdrawing from the world around him. He kept working with Halley, who had retired from UMKC but continues to coach.

“Richard is a perfectionist, and that’s a double-edged sword,” Halley says. “It means he works very hard, but it’s also difficult for him to be comfortable unless he knows something very well.”

Life became more uncomfortable about a month ago for Gibson. Donald moved into a one-bedroom apartment, and Richard left his job as a bartender at Jardine’s.

“I’m homeless and I’m jobless,” Gibson says. “But my dreams are coming true. I know it’s going to be OK.”

Halley and his wife, Sarah, invited Gibson to move into their home.

“When you sing about love and death and betrayal, you get very close,” Halley explains.

A crowd of close to 400 people sits in the Muriel Kauffman Theatre. It’s a Thursday night. Family, friends and benefactors have been invited to watch the final dress rehearsal from the balcony.

Halley is in the audience, hopeful that this production signals a new chapter for the opera and his student. “His voice is really coming up,” he says of Gibson. “He’s like a pitcher with two good pitches. He just needs to have command of another two or three before he goes to the majors.”

And this is the majors. Turandot is the largest production in the 54-year history of the Lyric. The company has spent close to $175,000 on sets and costumes, which will be rented to the Austin Lyric Opera — a sign that other companies are taking notice of what is happening at the Kauffman Center. Luskin is also talking with the San Francisco Opera and the Washington National Opera about possible future collaborations.

Luskin, for his part, hopes that Turandot will raise the Lyric’s profile. He sees more opportunities for singers like Gibson. “You never know who is going to be phenomenally talented. You just have to give them a chance,” he says.

Three floors away, Gibson exhales in short, quick breaths beneath the light bulbs that wrap around the dressing-room mirror.

“I just want to connect with the audience,” he will say later of his preparation. “I want to figure out what they want and give it to them. This is a moment in history that we’re sharing, and nobody can take it from us.”

The sound of instruments tuning quiets the crowd. The music swells from the orchestra pit, and applause masks the sound of 200 feet shuffling onto the stage. The blue curtain rises. Gibson stands on the stage. He stretches on the balls of his feet. His mouth opens wide, and he begins to sing.

In the third act, tenor Arnold Rawls stands in the center of the stage and belts out “Nessun Dorma.” No one is sleeping. A short while later, the audience’s applause does not let up until Rawls and his fellow leads have taken three bows. Gibson lowers his head when it’s time for the chorus to be recognized. His feet move slowly through the confetti that fell during the finale. There is a bottleneck in the wings.

Gibson uses the time to look out at the balcony, taking his hat off and running his hand through his hair. This is a moment that he doesn’t want to forget. “The memories don’t go away in the quiet moments of our life,” he says. “They are always there waiting when your head hits the pillow.”

And this night, when his head hits the pillow, it is “Nessun Dorma” that he will hear. Eight years later, he’s not escaping. He’s running toward that dream.