Expect a healthy dose of extra spicy

October 23, 2006

By ENRIQUE FERNANDEZ efernandez DEBORAH GRAY MITCHELL STRONG VOICES: Angela Brown, left, as Aida and Guang Yang as Amneris. Beehive, a health food store at the crossroads of Red and Bird roads, serves a strict vegan lunch menu out of a tiny counter. Where else would one take the celestial Ada, beautiful princess enslaved by the Egyptian king and in love with the salvatore della patria himself, Captain Radames, her captor, her enemy, her passion? Angela Brown, who made The New York Times exclaim, ''At last an Ada,'' was born

in Indianapolis. A Hoosier, lyric soprano, protagonist of the grandest of grand operas at the Florida Grand Opera's grand opening of its season, taking the Sanford and Dolores Ziff Ballet Opera House for a wild spin. ''She's vulnerable but spicy,'' she says of the character in Giuseppe Verdi's opera. ``She has nerve with everyone.'' This delights Brown, the nervy princess she's singing. ''And she's a pleaser,'' she adds, slipping more into her own nervy self. ''She's a punk,'' she laughs. She's happy with the surprisingly sensual vegan food prepared by Carlos, the Brazilian chef. Carlos hands her a sample of his banana frozen custard. ''No milk, no eggs, no sugar, no funny stuff,'' he says. That delights her too: no funny stuff. Since she became a strict vegan in the past two months, she's been losing the weight she put on when she ''fell off the wagon'' of a vegetarian diet a few years ago. ''I need

some sexy studio shots of myself so I can show off my new waist,'' says the 42-year-old soprano. ''How else am I going to get a man?'' And she laughs some more and says she didn't mean it. This is a ''humongous'' opera, she says. ``It's an all-night party. At the temple!'' MONUMENTAL EFFORT Indeed, Florida Grand Opera picked Ada for its Carnival Center opening precisely because it's monumental. ''You can't do it very often,'' says FGO's director of production Vladimir Vukovic. ``It's too expensive.'' The stats are daunting. Nine hundred lights hanging from 19 pipes. Sixty people working over six months to build the sets -- including walls 45 feet tall -- designed by Allen Charles Klein; 60 technicians onstage setting them up. And during the performance, 175 people onstage at one time. Two hundred sixty-five costumes, also Klein's. Brown loves her outfits. After she says how much they reveal (''My . .

.. are out!''), she changes her phrasing to the more demure ``voluptuous,'' admitting that ''I never had a costume quite like that.'' This is one spicy princess, all right. ''Each time I do a different Ada production, I find something new.'' This time what she found is within herself. ''You can get caught up in the character and forget vocal production. But this time I find I can let myself go.'' It's her growth as an artist, she says. Her mastery of the difficult craft of the soprano.' The role, she explains, is written with shimmering highs, a middle where she can float easily. ''And just a little mezzo taste at the bottom,'' she growls in a voice first honed singing gospel at her Baptist minister grandfather's church. But what she loves are the highs. ''I love soaring,'' she says. ``By the third act, I'm really having fun. `THROUGH THE RINGER' ''To have that power and then to die after all

that hollering.'' And she emits the perfectly pitched sigh that signals Ada's death, much to the delight of her fellow vegans at Beehive. ''Ada takes me through the ringer,'' she says. ``But I love it!'' The soprano is singing 12 performances of the opera in Miami. ''I've never done 12 anything,'' she says. ``I'll really see what I'm made of.''Peter H

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