For the eighth time, Fishtown resident Jeremy Milner performed at the Academy House as a part of Opera Philadelphia. As part of the Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts, Milner played the role of the friar in Giusseppe Verdi’s “Don Carlo.” The show was performed in Italian with English subtitles and ran from April 24 to May 3.

“[Opera Philadelphia has] been very, very generous to me and they’ve been a great home for me artistically,” Milner said.

Opera, and specifically “Don Carlo,” is a very emotional and influential kind of drama—it is a story about family ties and a messy love triangle between Elizabeth, King Philip II of Spain and his son, Don Carlo.

“The music is really very powerful. The drama is really rather exciting,” Milner said.

Milner’s character had a very indefinite role in the opera.

“The friar is more or less an ambiguous character. It’s questionable within the text whether or not he is actually the presumed deceased emperor or not,” he said. “But, within the context of the drama of the opera, it’s never really clear whether or not it is actually Charles the IV or if everyone just believes it to be Charles the IV.”

Troy Cook, another Opera Philadelphia performer, has worked with Milner in the past. The two of them worked together in “La Boheme” in 2012, although in “Don Carlo” they did not have much on-stage time together.

“My character in “Don Carlo” and Jeremy’s character don’t really have a lot of on-stage interaction but Jeremy and I are friends because we worked together in “La Boheme” here at Opera Philadelphia and his character and my character had a lot of interaction together,” Cook said.

Because opera is such a small and close-knit community, performers tend to work alongside one another more than once, which is beneficial to them.

“It’s a pleasure when you look on a cast list for a job you’re doing in a year and you see a familiar name, like Jeremy,” Cook said.

The rehearsals began about a month and a half before the show and Milner and Cook both worked hard to musically prepare.

“Once you have studied and prepared, then eventually we arrive at rehearsals… and then we have staging rehearsals. Usually, we just go right into stage rehearsals,” Milner said.

With different roles, cast members can go about practicing in their own ways.

“It’s a lot of preparation, a lot of self-preparation, a lot of self-studying. Me, personally, I like to not only learn what I have to but I like to learn everything else that’s happening around it. I like to be able to have a complete picture of the play as it were,” Milner said.

Milner, originally from Oklahoma, moved to Philadelphia in 2006 after attending the University of Tulsa and working for about seven years. He now lives in Fishtown, which makes his commute to the opera very easy. He enjoys living in the Riverward neighborhood.

“I lived in New York for a little while and really, going from Oklahoma to New York, I really didn’t like the immediacy and the sense of anonymity within a mass that is present in New York City,” Milner said.

Fishtown has made Milner feel like he has a place to call home.

“When I moved to Philadelphia I really found a place where I felt like I had a home again. I had a community in which I lived,” Milner said.