Since part of our MizzouNYC website is publishing a quarterly newsletter about our events and members, I’m always looking for new people to profile and promote within our group. I had known Ryan in my last year at the University of Missouri — we did West Side Story together (he was Tony, I was a random Jet girl gutter slut) and later worked together at the Gap in Columbia. I’ve followed his career as an opera singer from a distance, and when I’d moved to New York, we’d reconnected a little online as he gave me advice for what to do around town.
He’d disappeared more recently, but when my close friend Andi did a production of La Traviata with him in Tampa, I saw a chance to contact him and profile him for our newsletter. He happily accepted and answered my questions promptly, in between rehearsals in Vienna for another production.
It’s always easy to write when you have plenty of material, and Ryan’s been busy traveling the globe as an opera singer now for 15 years. Read the full interview here.