More Teddy:
Merry Christmas, everybody! 
As Don Giovanni to
Jud Arthur's
Commendatore at
Opera Australia, 2007
With
Leanne Kenneally as Count and Countess Almaviva
in
Opera Australia's 2006
Nozze di Figaro
Teddy Tahu Rhodes in New York's SoHo, 2008 (at aged 41).
http://www.metoperafamily.org/operanews/issue/article.aspx?id=4912&issueID=322Too Darn Hot
Teddy Tahu Rhodes, the buff baritone who sings the title role in Santa Fe's Billy Budd this summer, tells BARRY SINGER why he’s tired of being promoted as Teddy Bare. June 2008, vol 72, no. 12
(....)
"Honestly, it happened just by default that I became an opera singer," he says over coffee after the rehearsal. He is a New Zealander through and through, with the aw-shucks heartiness of a true Kiwi bloke. Yet there is watchfulness underlying the easy nature, and one senses something sweetly tremulous about Teddy Tahu Rhodes.
(....)
The choir of a Christchurch, New Zealand boys' school was the first place Teddy Tahu Rhodes sang. There was no singing in his family at all, he insists, and no early opera exposure whatsoever. Rhodes was born to a British mother and a New Zealand father. (The Maori word "Tahu" — meaning "to set on fire" — was attached to the family name "when they first arrived.") Rhodes's parents divorced when he was two. The son barely knew the father, who died before Rhodes was out of his teens.
(....)
Rhodes wound up going on three times during Dead Man Walking's legendary San Francisco run. The response was extraordinary. "I received interest from virtually every opera company in America after that. I was invited back to San Francisco immediately. I signed to sing at Houston Grand Opera, where Patrick Summers is the music director. I've since done The Little Prince, Manon Lescaut, Figaro and Jake Heggie's The End of the Affair there, which Jake says he wrote with me in mind. I sang at Dallas Opera, at Cincinnati, Philadelphia, and at Washington Opera in D.C. I also got lots of work in Europe, though not in London, where I've only sung with the London Philharmonic. I guess they don't like me in London. I have sung with the Scottish and the Welsh National Operas, at Munich, Paris, Hamburg, Leipzig."
