Petaluma’s McTigue lives Mozart for ‘Flute’

“The angels brought me to Petaluma,” red-headed novelist, storyteller, teacher, stage director, lyricist and concept writer Amanda McTigue says. “I was working at Paramount Pictures’ North Carolina facility, when I got a call from Lynn Morrow to direct Roger and Hammerstein’s ‘Carousel’ at Sonoma State University. Then came 9/11, and everything turned upside down. I was at sixes and sevens. My longtime Petaluma writing partner Jeff Langley got cancer, so I took the job as his caregiver.”

This was how McTigue met her oncologist husband.

“We dated for awhile, but I felt unsettled. I finally decided to head home to North Carolina, so we went to Pt. Reyes on a misty day to walk and talk. Both of us had something to say, and fortunately I said ‘You go first.’ That was when he asked me to move in with him. We got married, and still live in the same little Petaluma house in a neighborhood filled with kids and lots of trucks.”

Since McTigue has been living and breathing Mozart for the past few months as stage director for “The Magic Flute” at SSU, it’s appropriate to ask - What would Mozart think of modern-day Petaluma?

“Mozart was a big-town kinda guy,” Amanda answers. “So he probably would live in San Francisco with its concert halls and restaurants - but he wrote for a Petaluma audience. Mozart would respect and love the same things I do about this area - the interesting way in which the ‘high artist’ is right next to the dairyman and the grape picker and we’re all in the same boat. Petaluma is the place he’d have his pied-a-terre because he liked real people and wrote for real people. This is where he could relax, get a glass of good wine and write his miraculously accessible and emotionally direct music for everyone.”

Amanda humbly admits she writes for Mozart’s audience.

“My roots speak through me. My father’s people were Irish-American, my mother’s went generations deep in the Deep South - two families of talkers who couldn’t abide each other’s talk.”

Her first novel mines those North Carolina memories. A book club favorite, “Going to Solace” takes place over a 1989 Thanksgiving in a rural hospice where a handful of locals cross paths.

“I have an affinity for and love of humanity and my Irish side makes me write humor and tears on the same line - a big belly laugh and a big cry,” she said. “As a result, ‘Solace’ isn’t about grief, it’s about kickin’ ass.”

McTigue also loves working with today’s college students.

“First of all, ‘Flute’ is an Opera, a musical form most people don’t know. Then it starts with the so-called hero coming onstage surrounded by a snake and when the snake is killed, he faints. Later, puppeteer Mary Nagler’s life-sized elephant arrives and the kids take this astounding stage craft in stride. Today’s students are serious, focused, willing to put their phones away and work hard. This positive, open-to-trying-new-things learning style shapes and strengthens their performance.”

Mozart’s “The Magic Flute” is presented at the Evert B. Person Theater by the SSU schools of Theater Arts and Music through Sunday, March 5.