On Wednesday, Ryan Speedo Green will sing the role of Colline, the philosopher, in the Metropolitan Opera’s “La Bohème.” Hard to believe that in 1998 a 12-year-old Ryan was being carted off to a juvenile detention center, having plotted to murder his family.
As described in the new biography of Green out Tuesday, Daniel Bergner’s “Sing for Your Life,” his Virginia upbringing was steeped more in violence than in Verdi.
In the book, the bass-baritone’s mother, Valerie recounts an incident in which she threatened to stab his father, Cecil. Ryan was just four years old at the time and witnessed the end of their altercation. After the couple separated, she lashed out at Ryan and his older brother, Adrian. There was no love lost between siblings, either; one quarrel ended with Adrian dropping Ryan on a hot grill, scarring him for life.
It culminated in Ryan mapping out a plan to kill both mother and brother. After Valerie found it, Ryan was sent to Virginia’s DeJarnette Center for Human Development.
“Going back to that time is always a little tough for me,” Ryan, 30, tells The Post. “I put a lot of it to the back of my mind.” Bergner plowed through the facility’s logs to build a harrowing picture of Green’s stay there. He refused to see his mother, bullied other kids, and was placed in solitary.
One of the few things that kept him sane was a radio. He taught himself to sing a slew of Top 40 hits. “I heard songs like Backstreet Boys’ ‘Backstreet’s Back,’” he recalls. “Those took me to a place that was far away. Where I wasn’t contained, sad or angry. It was the first step in expressing myself.”
After two months, he left the institution, moved back home and, despite rough patches, made efforts to make amends with his mom. He also returned to school, where he joined the choir, primarily to score an easy credit. At 14, he went on a school trip to the Met to see “Carmen.” He was instantly transfixed by the sound, the spectacle, the applause.
Playing Carmen that night was mezzo-soprano Denyce Graves. “She was the person I wanted to be like,” he says. “To have [my] first experience in what is mainly a Caucasian art form be through an African-American changed my perception of opera.”
It kick-started years of training, including three at the Met’s prestigious Lindemann Young Artist Development Program. It wasn’t just vocal training he needed, but a grasp of several languages. “I’m now at the point where I can sing in Russian, Italian, German, French and Czech,” he says. “Those languages are not very easy to come by when you’re growing up in a trailer park or low-income housing.”
But the effort paid off in 2011, when he beat 1,200 opera hopefuls to win the Met’s National Council Auditions.
These days, Green — who stands 6-foot-5 and wears size 17 shoes — lives in Vienna but stays on the Upper West Side whenever he’s performing at the Met. He can always count on seeing one fan in the audience: his mother, who comes up from Virginia to see almost every one of his performances in the city. “I’ve realized I’m a completely different person from when I was 12,” he says. “As much as we’ve gone through in the past, I don’t think I have a bigger fan than her!”