The headline is meant to convey an enthusiastic response to something I’ll attempt to analyze. I liked it.
Alison Mackay has grown from her role playing violone & double bass with Tafelmusik into their programmer extraordinaire, creating a series of inter-disciplinary programs over the past decade. I thought that last year’s Sesquicentennial project Visions & Voyages: Canada 1663 – 1763 raised the bar, in its integration of politically charged cultural history, employing music, text and images to explore the relationships between Indigenous Peoples and settlers. In that concert I felt Mackay was going beyond her previous role as a curator of images, words & music to venture something deeper & more ambitious. While it’s not opera nor fiction it begins to resemble a kind of documentary, opening a very special kind of conversational space.
And now Safe Haven has taken us further, a remarkable combination of elements that for me succeeds admirably. The title reflects a kind of mission I sense in this piece and among the performers. I call it a piece because I think we’re again beyond the realm of curated content and into something resembling an inter-disciplinary performance. Where Visions & Voyages was likely commissioned in context with the Sesquicentennial and as such had a kind of formal guise in a desire to explore the very meaning of “Canada”, this is I believe an even deeper venture.
But we’re not exploring because of some abstract date on a calendar. I think there’s a genuine concern underlying this piece drawn from the headlines and arrivals of refugees in the past year. We are exploring the phenomenon of exile, the motivations and experiences of the refugee in different centuries in diverse circumstances. While we discover instances in the first half of the evening, of the fertilization accomplished by displacements –as if to present us with the historical evidence that refugees are good for a society—in the second half we’re much more into a pure celebration grounded in musical terms, the actual experience of the encounter itself. Where the first half was intellectual and linear, as we move towards the end of the concert, we could be in any century, watching the cross-fertilization of musics and musicians meeting not so much face to face, as sound to sound, at times in a kind of intercultural jam session. We revisit Vivaldi with some new exotic instruments.
So yes, I thought I sensed Mackay pushing the envelope even further this time. Where the first half felt like the documentary, recounting history through the use of musical performance, images and text but carefully narrated and logically unfolding, the second half went in a slightly more reflective and purely emotional direction –not unlike what we’d seen last year—as the purely musical and celebratory side came to the fore. The intellectual edge of the first half was balanced by a more purely abstract exploration.
I recall a conversation with Eliot Hayes many years ago, when my operatic ideas got shot down on the premise that I was hazarding “big ideas”. The word was spoken with a kind of embarrassment, as though I should have known not to believe I should ever undertake such complex topics.
Yes big ideas are hard to present. Last year’s Visions & Voyages was important precisely because of ambition, of daring to undertake impossibly complex and abstract subjects. And yet this year dares even more, going further. I can’t think of a more thorny topic than the images we’ve seen in this country showing families in boats, hearing of children drowning. For me this is what is so astonishing, as Mackay in her last two programs for Tafelmusik dared to undertake something far beyond mere music.
I’ll be thinking of these composers in some new ways as a result of this program and the fascinating links. I already knew of Vivaldi as an inspiration for JS Bach, but discovered more tonight. I would never have connected Lully to the Huguenots and their exodus from France.
Tafelmusik’s Safe Haven, with creator Alison Mackay at left, Diely Mori Tounkara kora, Lucas Harris, lute, Maryem Tollar, vocals, and Naghmeh Farahmand, percussion (photo: Jeff Higgins)
I can describe some of the participants for you, but my words can’t nearly create the effect you have when you hear Diely Mori Tounkara’s kora, whether gently intoning a solo or played as part of the Four Seasons. Or I can mention Maryem Tollar’s narration & singing, or the percussion of Naghmeh Farahmand. As much as this presentation concerns welcoming people into cultures, it was also a concert enacting a welcome to musicians on the stage at the Jeanne Lamon Hall at Trinity St Paul’s Centre, Tafelmusik showing us what a welcome looks and sounds like.
I’m eagerly anticipating the time when they put this onto a DVD, as I really want to be able to watch this and absorb it further, a creation of wonderful richness, and great beauty. And of course I cried in a few places. That’s the thing with big ideas. They’re unwieldy and dangerous but they must be addressed. I feel I must add as a sort of afterthought (the morning after, still in awe), that for some of us this is pushing very personal buttons, recalling family escaping Budapest and other Hungarians hazarding the mountains, having parts amputated from the cold, but still grateful for finding this particular safe haven, Canada. I’m running that Biblical passage through my head in a slightly different version, impressed with the empathy at the core of Mackay’s imagination (thinking of doubting Thomas & faith). Blessed are they who see suffering and offer refuge. But especially blessed, to empathize without having seen or lived through it.
So of course, tears.
Safe Haven continues Jan 20 & 21 at Jeanne Lamon Hall, and Jan 23rd at George Weston Recital Hall.
Tafelmusik’s Safe Haven showing one of Rava Javanfar’s stunning projections (photo: Jeff Higgins)
I went to a small school where hero-worship was natural, given that we were all boys (that changed as they admitted girls for the first time in the very year I left, and yes I wish it had been sooner). We were taught to look to the older students for their example, and the older boys naturally tried to set a good example. Yes, in those days alumni were “Old Boys” because of course they were all boys and they were old in at least two senses of the word:
Former students
Old people, “old boys” being a nicer euphemism than “old men”
We would hear of the exploits of our Old Boys, going on to do great things as adults after graduation.
I used to read John’s pieces in the Globe & Mail, among the most interesting & best written you’d find in that paper, whether you fancy food, poetry or ideas on how to fix the sport & business of ice hockey, (still one of the most interesting things I’ve ever seen written on the topic). I want to be very careful as I publish his responses to my questions in this space, given that he’s a better writer than I’ll ever be, and want to be sure to honour his thoughtful choice of words.
Why am I interviewing him? Because John was and is an extra—or to use the fancy word, a “supernumerary” –in productions with the Canadian Opera Company over a period of decades. That makes him both a participant and an observer. I sought to capture some of that for the blog, timing it for the week of the opening performance of his next appearance, namely Rigoletto. John will be onstage with Gilda & the Duke & Monterone & Rigoletto himself. He won’t be singing, but he is up there onstage, as he has been so often. I’ve got some questions that I ask him but first, let’s find out a bit more about who he is. While I usually assemble a kind of biographical sketch, I couldn’t do any better than to let my interview subject tell his own story. Trust me, it will eventually segue into Rigoletto as neatly as that loud C-minor chord by Verdi.
Stefan Vinke in the title role in the Canadian Opera Company production of Siegfried, 2016 fearlessly meeting the magic fire (photo: Michael Cooper)
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I’m from Toronto, and grew up in the new subdivisions of North York as a sports-crazed outdoorsy kid before being packed off to the downtown all-male academic hothouse known as University of Toronto Schools (UTS) at the age of 11. That was life-changing, as much for the strange and interesting brainiacs I encountered every day for the next seven years as for the slightly gritty and always stimulating urban environment that became my new norm. I was much more of the jock type than an A-student scholar, but I belatedly discovered some academic skills and found my way to University of Toronto, where I studied Latin and Greek, partly as an extreme assertion of non-conformity, mainly because it seemed like the richest and purest pursuit of knowledge I could imagine. From Toronto I went to Oxford for another three years, and for better or for worse spent more time on broader cultural pursuits – travel, museums, cooking, journalism, playing what the British call ice hockey – than on serious academic slogging.
I came back to Canada thinking I might like to write but not knowing how to get started. I worked at U of T for a bit, went to law school and dropped out fairly quickly, picked up some freelance editing work that kept me alive, got married and had a child in very short order and after a number of curt telephone rejections eventually persuaded someone at The Globe and Mail to let me write a sample article on wine and food. That developed into an unlikely summer internship, and 32 years later I retired from what was an extremely varied if highly eccentric career in journalism. For much of the time I was a feature writer, which meant I was a generalist who could be expected to write about almost anything, but I also wrote columns about food, TV, family life, language and being a sports fan, as well as turning out a daily book review over a crazy 18-month period and writing a weekly deadline poem. In the middle of all that I managed to add annual bouts of supering for the COC, and the amazing thing is that, apart from one very tense night cutting and editing my massive obituary of Rob Ford during brief rehearsal breaks, these parallel lives rarely came into conflict – they even dovetailed neatly when I chronicled my work in Siegfried for the Globe Arts section at the same time that I was sitting on the Globe editorial board. I left The Globe in 2016 and now spend my days as an urban vagabond, wandering the city’s ravines and getting in shape for long, hilly walks in Europe.
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And now for some questions.
Are you more like your father or your mother?
My father was a smart and passionate obstetrician and gynecologist who also taught medical students at the University of Toronto. When I took my newborn son to our pediatrician, a former student, the first thing he said to me was, “People either loved or hated your father. I loved him.” I don’t think I inspire nearly as strong a reaction in either direction, but I share my father’s extremely critical manner and direct way of making my views known. In my kindergarten report card, I was criticized for my over-eagerness in telling other children how to do things right. My friends at university predicted, not always kindly, that I would become a judge. Clearly this is a quality that you need to rein in as an opera super — my colleagues would say I’m not always successful. But there’s a good side to this candour that I hope I also got from my father: He was afraid of nothing and no one, and would never hesitate to call out bad behaviour and hypocrisy, no matter what the consequences.
My father always wanted to be an actor. Oddly, his ambition for me was that I would become a hockey player. He wasn’t around much when I was growing up, given the time-consuming, unpredictable nature of obstetrics in those days, and it was my mother who did a lot of the minute-by-minute parenting. So I had a rather distant relationship with him for many years, and it wasn’t helped by his not always welcome criticism of my on-ice performance when he came to my games. I didn’t take hockey seriously enough as a result and it cost me as a player – though after a lot of conflict and torment, I found my way to what I think was a more stimulating and rewarding life of the mind. But it’s interesting to reflect back on this choice when I work in opera and observe the extreme dedication that aspiring singers bring to their craft – what if I’d applied myself with the same determination way back when, what could I have achieved by following my father’s overly opinionated guidance?
What is the best or worst thing about what you do?
When I was a journalist, at least on the good days, I was lucky enough to get paid to learn new things and meet fascinating people. I was surrounded by clever, quirky, irreverent colleagues at The Globe who cared deeply about their work and talked with quick-witted eagerness about anything and everything. One of our problems with the outside world was how slowly it seemed to move in comparison with the impatient, accelerated newsroom style where everyone was a step or two ahead in their thinking. I miss that chatter, though of course when you finally sat down to start a 5,000-word profile of a political leader that was going to run on the weekend, the last thing you wanted was your colleagues arguing about bike lanes three feet from your churning brain. I always found writing hard, and what I loved about shaping words and ideas into an article that would hold people’s attention, make them think new thoughts and give them some ephemeral pleasure was also what I feared – at any given point in the writing process, there’s an infinite number of possible choices but only a finite amount of time in which to make them. In daily journalism, you have to accept that you can never be as good as you want to be, and that went strongly against my somewhat paralysing perfectionist streak. As a methodical stylist who tended to work week to week rather than moment to moment, I feared the short deadlines that were the norm in my business, and I missed out on some good opportunities because I didn’t think I could write to my standards against a ticking clock. But whenever I was forced into that situation, I realized that I loved the adrenalin rush as much as anyone, and enjoyed the challenge of performing within seemingly impossible conditions. My all-time favourite was trying to write a piece about the infamous Jose Bautista bat-flip game during the 2016 baseball playoffs – I had the luxury of filing from the Rogers Centre press box within an hour of the game’s ending, but there were so many crazy twists and turns that I had to wait until the on-field dramatics were finally done before I could begin to figure out what I’d just seen.
I’ll just add as an afterthought, because not many people have these experiences in common, that being present when Jose Bautista hit his game-changing home run and 50,000 people erupted into a single stadium-shaking scream was not so different from being on stage and in the centre of the action during the thrilling Council Chamber scene in Simon Boccanegra. You can feel the excitement in your body.
Who do you like to listen to or watch?
Well I have three cats, so I don’t feel like I need to spend a lot of time on cat videos. Compared to most people, I have a soft spot for real life, and try to avoid phones and computer screens as time-consuming distractions. But if I’m working at my desk, I’ll often listen with varying degrees of attention to the on-line opera streams (which are more the aria/overture streams) on CBC Music and ICI Musique as well as full-length operas on BBC. I tend not to watch operas on YouTube, though when I get a supering role I might study scenes so I can become familiar with the way words, music and action all combine. I record the Met operas when they turn up on PBS and the wackier range of European productions on the more obscure Mezzo channel (including a Rameau opera set in a giant refrigerator, Hippolyte et Aricie).
One of my tasks at home is to have recorded TV ready for post-dinner viewing, so I keep an eye out for uncut old movies that might pass the time nicely and bear repeated watching – Casablanca, The Third Man, Singin’ in the Rain. Classic TV comedies like 30 Rock, the early Simpsons, Larry Sanders, some Seinfeld are also popular. My taste in film comedies is a bit too boyish for the household, so I tend not to get to watch Animal House and Slap Shot as often as I’d like. Ditto suspense/adventure, though I can sometimes get away with classics like The Great Escape or The Guns of Navarone but never anything with Bruce Willis, Mel Gibson or Steven Seagal. When I was recovering from hernia surgery a few years ago, my wife unexpectedly brought me all the great Jean-Pierre Melville movies in the Criterion Collection to pass the time – which turned my recuperation into two of the happiest weeks in my life.
Not surprisingly, I like stylized Hitchcock movies, especially when I can persuade a younger person like my daughter to see their appeal – Rear Window and North by Northwest in particular. Christopher Guest’s satires are a shared pleasure, particularly A Mighty Wind (which mocks the folk craze of my very early youth) though I think my wife has seen Spinal Tap at least once too often. My Favourite Year with Peter O’Toole is probably our favourite movie together.
Obviously I skew old and nostalgic.
I became addicted to a vivid French series on TV5 about regional heritage called Les racines et les ailes, that takes me to remote places I could imagine walking to someday. In a similar vein, my wife and I are devotees of the Tour de France, and any other beautiful bike races that find their way onto Canadian TV. She also likes baseball, so Blue Jays games are a godsend.
If I’m alone in the house, I’ll sometimes listen to an entire opera and try to follow along in the original language – Cosi and Boheme are particularly good for my languishing Italian. Live opera on radio conjures up the excitement of being a super, but I can’t stand the prolonged Met intermission chatter so that’s a trade-off. I really miss the recorded COC productions that CBC once aired, particularly those where I thought I could hear my heavy-footed noisemaking on the stage (as a tottering plague victim in Idomeneo, as a tightly drilled marching soldier in the same show). I love to listen to Bach, a reflection of my contrapuntal Lutheran upbringing. We seem to have a lot of Baroque music around the house, and Cecilia Bartoli’s melancholy Italian love songs are at the top of the pantheon. The music critic at The Globe introduced me to Suzie LeBlanc’s Acadian songs and I’m eternally grateful. A classmate who played guitar when we were unsuccessfully rebellious teenagers discovered John Dowland’s lute music via Julian Bream (whose concerts we used to sneak into at Massey Hall), and I’ve been a fan ever since. I eventually sang a Dowland song at a student performance when I briefly took singing lessons. When I was young, I spent too much time for my own good in downtown clubs listening to blues, and I still get a thrill out of hearing the likes of Junior Wells and Buddy Guy. Somewhere I developed a taste for the songs of Charles Trenet, and I memorized a few of them (Je suis heureux, j’ai tout et j’ai rien) so I could pass the time on the gym treadmill by singing them to myself. My head is filled with old, really bad rock and roll from my childhood that I’m told I should never sing out loud, but that doesn’t stop me.
What ability or skill do you wish you had, that you don’t have?
Of course I wish I could really sing. Apart from not having the discipline to learn technique, I was always too inhibited about how I’d sound. I took lessons briefly in my 20s, and got to the point of performing Cole Porter’s Night and Day for a small well-disposed crowd, so at least I conquered some of my fears.
When you’re just relaxing and not working, what is your favourite thing to do?
I do a little too much relaxing now that I’m retired, so the key for me is to find relaxation that still has an element of work involved. My idea of taking it easy is to go on long, fast walks through Toronto ravines with a talkative friend, shovel snow for hours on end, try to solve cryptic crosswords and reclaim my lost youth by doing chin-ups and dips at the gym. But my favourite activity is my weekly reading group (which my son attends, bussing in from Hamilton, an added pleasure) where we do our best to translate and make sense of Homer, Ovid and Moliere – as good as literature gets.
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More questions about life as an extra with the Canadian Opera Company, including the upcoming Rigoletto
Does a supernumerary (aka “extra”) need to know how to act?
We’re certainly asked to act by our directors, and when we do our jobs well we’re using our faces and our gestures to make the larger stage action more convincing and layered. It’s a tricky balance, of course, because often as a super your job is not to draw attention to yourself and away from the principal singers – you may be part of a crowd scene or an impassive henchman or a lowly servant, and it’s necessary to accept that the spotlight is definitely not on you. At the same time, you need to show fear, surprise, delight, disgust, vendetta-like fury and all those other oversized operatic emotions where the words and music call for it. As a small body on a big stage in a large theatre, you may have to overstate your reactions to reach your audience – directors will be sure to tell you when they think you’ve gone too far.
I used to be shy but I think I’ve learned over the years to risk doing more rather than playing it safe with less. The turning point might have been in La Boheme where those of us brought in as super soldiers were initially asked just to be a part of the troop that marches on-stage at the end of the street scene in Act II. But the director decided that since we were hanging around rehearsal anyway, we might as well join the Parisian crowd from the start of the act. And then we were left to our own devices to act like soldiers hanging out in Paris, eyeing the ladies, keeping the local urchins in line, bartering for second-hand musical instruments. In those situations, you might develop a bit of dialogue to make the pantomime more credible, while making sure not to talk over the singing – and generally you can count on one of the COC choristers to make you laugh and break character. I remember in Carmen, hawking my souvenir bulls in the middle of the crowds, when one of the female chorus looked up and said with faux-innocent wonder, “Oh look, the bulls are anatomically correct.” In my memory, one young member of the children’s chorus then said, “What’s anatomically correct mean?”
But improvising has its limits with complex staging – you think you’re the most natural boulevardier in all of Paris and suddenly you’re tripping over Mimi. It’s quite shaming to be called out by the director in front of the entire cast, so it’s also important as a super to have huge reserves of humility. There’s no talking back.
Super roles, and the skill-sets required, vary hugely. The first requirement, we’re always told, is that we fit the costume. Size matters. I lost a role in a recent opera because my waist was too small for the trousers that went with the part – damned with faint praise! There are many physically imposing roles I won’t get because I’m too short, and it doesn’t always help my cause that I’m getting older and balder. Of course, that made me useful as an old servant in Madama Butterfly – the one who looked genuinely shocked the first time Goro, our overseer, cuffed me across the head for daring to steal a glance at the visiting Americans. But even in the character of a rickety old man, the real me still needed the ability to fall suddenly down to my (padded) knees on a severely sloped stage, hold that tough posture without moving for several minutes, and then rise up on cue in a sudden movement without tottering and scuttle quickly off stage on legs that had probably fallen asleep.
On a crowded stage with constant movement, it’s important to have a hyper-acute sense of your surroundings and anticipate the unexpected – eyes in the back of your head, we always say. But don’t get too self-congratulatory about your superhuman Gretzky-like vigilance: You still have to watch the action in front of you and not be in the way if the tenor suddenly veers left instead of right. And if someone forgets to take a cup or a plate off stage at the end of a banquet scene, a careful super will do some instant housekeeping and take the offending item away so it’s not interfering with the next scene. Of course, you can be too smart for your own good – I spotted a scarf on the floor in Tosca and carried it off triumphantly, only to be called out for removing a crucial plot device. Fortunately, it was a rehearsal, where goofing up is part of the process.
I like super roles with an element of physicality, and when directors ask for volunteers my hand will shoot up. In Fidelio (“Is there anyone who’s not afraid of heights?”) I got to descend from a very tall ladder at the start of the show carrying files from the drawers that stretched up to the top of the stage. In Simon Boccanegra, I was part of the mob that disrupted the formal council meeting. I not only got to toss chairs, trusting that they would stop short of the orchestra pit, but engaged in a carefully choreographed fight scene that involved several throws and falls on the stage, all synched with the rising clamour of the chorus. The most demanding role of all was in the highly abstract production of Siegfried where supers and professional dancers combined into a choreographed ring of fire in Act III, using our hands to portray flame. Several of us – smaller, more nimble, possessed of huge stamina, unaffected by claustrophobia, slightly mad – were also chosen to lie tightly together in a small hole under the stage and over 20-plus minutes of awesomely dramatic music, using only our rising and falling arms, simulate the fire in which Siegfried forges his sword, just inches from our hidden faces. We gave ourselves a quiet round of weary applause every time we pulled off that feat.
There’s nothing quite that demanding in Rigoletto, although a few of us do act out the brutalizing of Monterone (played by Robert Pomakov) with some carefully choreographed punches. For the most part, we’re somewhat louche gentlemen in a club playing cards with the choristers, reading newspapers, sipping espresso and reacting to their singing, while trying to avoid thinking too hard about the nasty patriarchal world we’re a part of — registering disgust and contempt and delight where appropriate but looking the other way when necessary. This is harder than a physical role, at least for me, because it’s so dramatically nuanced and carefully timed to the words and music. But the director, Christopher Alden, has been very good about keeping us attentive to the sudden mood swings and sudden stylized freezes. Our final contribution is in what we’ve been calling the orgy scene toward the end of the opera – given my age, and the fact that my daughter plays one of the women in the Duke’s court, I’m happy to hide out at the back of the stage and writhe on my chair in blissful solitude.
When the COC prepares an opera, usually it’s well-known and available on records, such as Verdi’s Rigoletto. While it may not be required, do you ever listen to recordings or watch DVDs in anticipation of an opera you’re preparing?
That’s an essential part of the extended supering experience for me, getting to know an opera better while at the same time allaying my pre-performance anxiety. As a word person, I like to read the libretto both for the pleasure of the language, which is too often ignored or belittled by music-lovers – Nixon in China is amazing — but also to have a better sense of what is going on all around me while I’m smiling or frowning. Directors really don’t like a toothy grin when the words say you’ve turned morose. Video can be highly misleading, since productions vary so completely – I really had second thoughts about doing Siegfried after seeing a creaky, glacial Bayreuth production, but ours turned out to be a lot more fun and energetic. A vintage Pavarotti Rigoletto I watched to get a sense of pacing was also discouraging because it was too formal and elaborate in the old style – ours feels brisker and more relatable. So maybe, now that I think about it, it’s better to come into a show without preconceptions or too much advance knowledge. Opera buffs don’t seem to make good supers. I know that some of the operas I’ve enjoyed the most were those that were unfamiliar to me – Nixon in China, Roberto Devereux, Idomeneo, Simon Boccanegra (which I listened to in advance with some disappointment, only to realize in rehearsals that Verdi wrote two versions and I’d heard the wrong one). You have to remember that over several months of rehearsal and performance, there’s plenty of time for the music to grow on you, and maybe it’s better to experience the thrill of discovery and feel like you’re performing in the moment.
Do you ever listen to your scenes on record afterwards, as for instance the last act procession in Carmen or the fire music in Siegfried?
My wife is always on the lookout for Christmas and birthday presents for me, because I’m pretty indifferent to material things, so souvenir opera CDs became the go-to gift. My favourite was probably Simon Boccanegra: At any given moment as I hear the music, I can still visualize where I was, what I was doing, how we worked together so seamlessly across the crowded stage as we waved torches and herded choristers (don’t let them hear me say that!) in the conspiratorial darkness. This powerful and wonderful sensation of instant displacement has no comparison in any other part of my life. When I hear the bullfighters marching in near the end of Carmen, in my head I’m once again a souvenir-seller looking out into the aisles of the Four Seasons Centre and pointing out the picadors to some pocket-picking kids because our innovative director Joel Ivany decided to bring in the procession through the theatre. Sometimes I’ll be sitting at my desk, lost in the distant wanderings of Odysseus, and suddenly my flame-hands music from Siegfried will pop up on Radio-Canada’s online opera station and I’ll be right there under the stage, staring up at Stefan Vinke and preparing to give my fingers a sudden shake. Even thinking about it now, I get a frisson of fully committed pleasure. Wow.
Stefan Vinke in the title role in the Canadian Opera Company production of Siegfried, 2016 including John’s “flame-hands”. (photo: Michael Cooper)
Can you tell us about your many different appearances with the COC (the operas & who you were playing)?
Okay, here goes. I did a couple of shows when I was young and intrigued by this strange, new dramatic form called opera I’d discovered while a student in England. In Werther (the 1979-80 season) I was a very nervous, possibly even terrified, villager in the joyful Christmas scene at the top of the show. That led to an amazing Otello directed by Lotfi Mansouri and starring James McCracken (1980-81), where I was one of many worried citizens in the opening storm scene, which was followed by some drunken carousing where I convincingly waved a drinking mug and less successfully tried to dance with my female counterpart. My vow: Never dance in an opera again.
Then that long break called life. I made my unheralded comeback in Fidelio (2008-9), lured in by my daughter who was between jobs and decided that she’d like to try supering based on the stories I’d told her about my youthful experiences. As it turned out, we both were selected to play cold-hearted bureaucrats in a Kafkaesque dystopia – must be a genetic thing. From which followed:
Simon Boccanegra (2008-9). At various points I was a pro-Boccanegra conspirator and late-night torch-carrier, a court official, a bearer of treasure-chests, a rioter and a brawler, and a wedding attendant, again with the torches. Talk about versatility.
Carmen (2009-10). I ogled the girls from the cigarette factory, then admired the testosterone-fuelled matador Escamillo. Too much enraptured staring for my taste.
Idomeneo (2009-10). One of the all-time great super experiences. I got to strip the clothing off poor Trojan prisoners, march in step and salute on cue with fellow Cretan guards, lift very heavy dead people onto stretchers and carry them off, stagger through the chorus as a scary plague victim, do some heavy-duty stage-shifting (at the dress rehearsal, I managed to fall into a suddenly exposed hole in the floor), perform carefully timed wedding ceremonials, and witness some amazing Mozart arias without looking like a fan. The only drawback was that the production seemed to take its style from early Star Trek and as soldiers we wore three layers of early space-age synthetic materials – on hot days, under hot lights, we were soaked with sweat.
Nixon in China (2010-11). I was the dad in a typical TV-watching American family that witnessed Richard Nixon’s trip to China, first by wolfing down TV dinners and then, transformed, by trying to eat chow mein with chopsticks. I wore an Elvis wig and garish bell-bottoms. My daughter had a blonde bouffant wig and played my wife. My actual wife still finds this creepy.
Trovatore (2012-13). As a soldier, I walked in the retinue of Russell Braun’s Count di Luna. At one point I made the fundamental super mistake of trying to push him on-stage after I thought he hadn’t heard his entrance cue. It turned out that he was just being a pro and waiting for the applause to die down from the previous aria. Fellow-supers who were there still won’t let me forget this. As a gypsy, I got to carry a gun and get into a show-down with some terrified, outnumbered chorister-soldiers, which is always fun. During the Anvil Chorus, I helped manufacture a wagon wheel (which I then had to wheel off-stage through the chorus – not easy) and tossed around celebratory wine-skins. My baseball experience came in handy, but some supers outright refused to play catch because no one wants to screw up in front of 2,000 people. I feel the same way about dancing.
La Boheme (2013-14). As well as walking around Paris at leisure, we soldiers had to march more formally with the military band that crashes the crowd scene, which involved hours of rehearsal for a few moments of well-drilled stage time. I got to carry and wave the regimental flag, a good way to get the attention of friends in the audience.
Roberto Devereux (2013-14). Among other tasks as guards in elaborate Elizabethan dress, two of us had the job of hauling around the imprisoned Roberto Devereux (or Bobby D. as he was known). Four different tenors played the role during the run, and we had to adjust our level of hands-on faux-brutality depending on the preferences of each performer. Our favourite was Leonardo Capalbo who turned to us when we first met and said simply, “Be rough.”
Madama Butterfly (2014/15). As a humble servant at the wedding ceremonials, I didn’t have to do much beyond working my way through the chorus serving tea and rice crackers. Except that at a single precise moment, I had to make a mad dash from the back of the stage to the front through the milling crowd (whispering “Coming through, watch out!”), carrying a cup of tea on a tray and dropping expertly to my knees centre-stage on a musical cue to meet Butterfly and Pinkerton. We had two Butterflys, and the first time I did my moves with Butterfly 2, I lifted up my tray from my reverent kneeling position – and she was nowhere to be seen.. “What’s he doing over there?”, she proclaimed in an angry whisper from stage right. I was in a state of heightened anxiety for the rest of the run.
Siegfried (2015-16). We supers played the role of fire – as hard as it sounds. We also writhed on the floor a lot, whether as a sort of abstract, metaphorical image of Siegfried’s brain, or as the extension of the dragon Fafner, whose gesticulating core was played by amazing dancers hanging in the air. My hardest task was to lie immobile for 40 minutes in Act II, and then repeat my motionlessness for seemingly interminable Wagnerian stretches in Act III, this time while kneeling and then standing at attention. We were given instructions on the best ways to slink off-stage if we started to faint.
Carmen (2015-16). In the first act, I played a soldier carrying documents back and forth across the square, meeting with fellow-soldiers for a brief chat, getting orders from desk-bound officers – so lots of mimed conversations and animated gestures. The second act took place in a sleazy bar, where I consorted with women of the night (not my strength, but we all have to try). Souvenir-selling in the Act IV bullfight scene was the high point – I got to walk down the aisles of the packed Four Season Centre waving my anatomically correct bulls on a giant pole and shouting (with tutelage from the COC’s French-language coach) “Les taureaux! Les beaux taureaux!”.
A scene from the Canadian Opera Company’s 2016 Carmen. John is proudly holding his anatomically correct bulls near the left edge of the photo (photo: Gary Beechey)
Tosca (2016-17). I was a natural playing a fussy priest, running on stage as the harried leader of a crowd scene. I managed to do a flip onto the floor in the final show and no one noticed – that’s how convincingly chaotic we were. We priests also had to march on-stage carrying a towering four-poled canopy in the elaborate Te Deum scene, and I don’t think we ever managed to be completely symmetrical, though not from lack of practice. Fellow supers would watch our awkward performance and score us out of 10 in post-scene criticism sessions. We were more successful as guards in the firing squad that disposed of Cavaradossi – helped by the director’s glass-half-filled observation that since we were meant to be Italian soldiers, the sloppiness of our moves actually seemed more convincing.
Rigoletto (2017-18). What don’t we do? In elaborate Victorian dress, we play cards, hoist drinks, admire ladies, disdain Rigoletto, look cool, give Monterone a thrashing, eventually hang him, kidnap a pretty girl, lounge around reading newspapers, admire the Duke’s lovemaking from a few centimetres away, writhe orgiastically ourselves – there’s so much to like about this one.
Looking back on your appearances with the COC, what was the toughest assignment, either for you or for extras around you?
Many assignments seem hard at the beginning and almost effortless by the end – so looking back, I don’t always see the toughness that seemed harrowing at the time. But the one scene that never got easy was lying outstretched and immobile on the sloped stage throughout most of Act II in Siegfried. If you somehow set yourself into an awkward position, you had to hold it no matter what the pain, and of course an itch became unbearable over 40 minutes. Fortunately, we had a small break partway through where we got to wake up, writhe forward and then retreat to our original resting-place – but you couldn’t always find your exact way back while writhing in reverse with other pyjama-clad bodies in the darkness. And then you’d discover yourself splayed awkwardly and painfully over an uneven surface while waiting for the beautiful singing of the Forest Bird that meant relief was in sight.
What’s your favourite opera that you’ve ever done, and which show made you most proud of your role?
Hard call, but Simon Boccanegra probably demanded the most of my supering skills at a stage when I didn’t even know I had them. The old-school English director, Ian Judge, was a demanding taskmaster who would always bring us to order by shouting “Boys, boys, boys!” He used us extensively throughout the opera and entrusted us with a leadership role on stage – where we ran around with gangs of chorus members waving torches that in my case always seemed to flicker out (you’d then cadge a light from your nearest fellow-super, though one overly dramatic colleague would only oblige if I asked him politely in Italian). The slightly dangerous live-action nature of these scenes was a thrill, as was the intricate fight scene at the front of the stage that was the culmination of a very carefully planned riot we supers instigated in the formal Council Chamber setting. But we also had quieter, more formalized moments, and got to work extensively alongside a very genial group of principal singers over the course of an unusually long rehearsal phase. Normally supers are part-timers who are called to rehearse only at nights and on weekends, but Ian Judge insisted that we work days as well and I happened to have four weeks of paid vacation that I had to burn up. So the entire experience, even allowing for a lot of hard, repetitive work and the occasional outbursts of directorial criticism, was supering paradise.
When you’re in an opera, I’d expect that you’re listening closely to the performances, perhaps thrilling to the voices. Who impressed you the most?
In fact we’re not always listening closely to the performances, at least not with full attention. Part of doing my job properly is being immersed in the task at hand – playing cards in Rigoletto, we’re throwing our money into the pot, accusing the dealer of cheating, pouring a shot of brandy from the decanter, no matter what the Duke is saying about questa or quella. And meanwhile another part of the brain is thinking ahead to our next move, the upcoming cues that will prompt us to change focus (and not screw up). The only time we really get to experience voices and performances like an audience does is when we’re standing in the wings, waiting for our next entrance, or when we’re dropped into a scene where our actual job is to focus attention on the singer. And then I find myself suddenly savouring the amazing powers of the human voice and thinking how lucky I am.
Okay, that’s the preamble. Almost all singers are impressive to me, so it’s invidious to pick out a few, but you asked. Paolo Gavanelli in Boccanegra was such a touching, tortured father-figure as an actor-singer with a huge dramatic range of lyricism and high emotion. He was close to us supers and we knew he was suffering from gout during the run, which made his work even more impressive. We also worked extensively with the Canadian bass Alain Coulombe, and as much as I enjoy his singing, I really like to watch his face – he’s expressive but never hammy, the definition of cool and suave, even when he’s about to meet his end in Carmen.
I first encountered the wonderful Tamara Wilson in Boccanegra but still wasn’t prepared for the fireworks when she sang an astonishing drama-queen aria inches from my ears as the crazed Elettra in Idomeneo.
Simon Boccanegra – (l – r) Mikhail Agafonov as Gabriele Adorno, Tamara Wilson as Maria Boccanegra and Paolo Gavanelli as Simon Boccanegra in the Canadian Opera Company’s production of Simon Boccanegra, 2009, (photo: Michael Cooper)
We had a number of Rodolfos in La Boheme, but I remember waiting to go on stage for the start of Act II as the young Michael Fabiano, who arrived late in the production cycle, was singing near the end of Act I – I can’t pretend to be a music critic, but I knew right away I was hearing a voice that was powerful, beautiful, tender and effortless.
How could I not be impressed by Stefan Vinke in Siegfried, especially because he spent a large part of Act I staring into the fire pit where we supers were lurking, and singing directly to our oscillating flame-hands with unlimited exuberance? He said at the time that we were as important to him as he was to us, which told me a lot about the role we supers play in conveying action and reaction – the more energy we supply, the better our singing counterparts can perform. But it only just occurred to me now that our fire-pit faces were veiled with a black mesh hood, so he must have been talking more precisely about our darting hands and fingers.
I have a soft spot for tragedy-tinged, guilt-ridden, silken-voiced mezzos and Allyson McHardy brought me to a halt every time I was passing through the wings backstage at Roberto Devereux. You’re just doing your job, thinking about an upcoming costume change, and suddenly you’re transfixed. Devereux generally was a great show for musical appreciation – two of us lucky supers got to stand guard throughout an astonishing high-tension scene between Russell Braun, Leonardo Capalbo and Sondra Radvanovsky, and we had to remind each other not to get lulled by the amazing sounds and forget our synchronized yanking of a giant on-stage carpet – look, the opera is still standing!
Of all the individual performances I’ve seen, Sondra’s in Devereux was the most awesome. She ranged from girlish and flirtatious to embittered old hag as Queen Elizabeth I, and she invested every moment with uninhibited dramatic intensity. Her face is wonderfully mobile, always expanding the emotional range of her singing. And she wasn’t afraid to make jarring, unpleasant sounds when her character and situation called for it, which made me realize a little late in my career that great opera is about real life, not abstracted beauty. My son had never seen an opera before I gave him tickets to Devereux. To this day he still talks about Sondra’s performance.
I get to be in the middle of a lot of good operas, and one revelation for me has been the greatness of the COC chorus. People are people in rehearsals — chatty, thoughtful, goofy, friendly, aloof — and you sometimes forget the artistry they can produce as a massed voice in a dramatic context, especially with all that added body language. There have been too many good moments to mention – the swelling street scene in Boheme, the excited bullfight crowd in Carmen, the prisoners’ chorus in Fidelio, the haunting Miserere in Trovatore, the humming chorus in Butterfly, Fuoco di gioia in Otello – but one I’ll never forget is the mass disruption of the Council Chamber in Boccanegra which starts in the cramped wings and builds inexorably to a fit of fury when the chorus invades the stage. As a marauding super, I always had to humble myself by remembering that everything I was proud of doing would be a lot harder if I also had to watch the conductor and sing perfectly.
You’ve done so many: but is there any opera you are especially wishing you could do?
I’d like to do Otello again – so much great music, crowd scenes that are supering-magnets and with luck I’m too old to dance. Failing that, any other big Verdi opera, maybe Don Carlo (I think I’d make a great condemned heretic). The upcoming Anna Bolena with Sondra Radvanovsky would be a great experience – if nothing else, I know my way around the Tudor costumes. And Hadrian by Rufus Wainwright is very intriguing, though I’m guessing that even at the super level, it might skew towards the young and beautiful.
Do you recall any director especially for what he or she showed you about acting, about opera, about what you could do?
It’s rare that supers go one on one with directors, unless we’ve stood out by doing something horribly wrong. Generally we work more closely with assistant directors who are especially skilled and patient at plotting out the intricacies of crowd scenes and teaching individuals to work as a group – great people such as Graham Cozzubbo who put us soldiers through our paces in La Boheme, and Marilyn Gronsdal who coached me as priest and firing-squad member last season in Tosca and now has perfected my timing as one of the Duke’s smooth henchmen in Rigoletto. James Binkley is an extremely amiable, safety-conscious, verisimilitude-crafting fight director who makes mild-mannered novices like me look convincing as thugs – watch for my back-handed thumping of Monterone in Act I of Rigoletto. As supers, we wouldn’t exist without the tireless, good-humoured women who co-ordinate our work with the COC, Elizabeth Walker and Analee Stein. And once we’re on the job, we rapidly come to realize what a complex team we’re a part of – the frighteningly competent yet still good-humoured stage managers and assistant stage managers are our moment-to-moment bosses, and they manage to see and know everything without losing their patience with adults who sometimes act like small children.
We’re always learning, but the one person who taught me the most in the shortest time was Donna Feore, our choreographer in Siegfried. In a matter of weeks, she turned a rag-tag bunch of random supers into a Wagnerian drill team, teaching us how to turn our arms and fingers into abstract flames, coaching us on music-cued formation walking around the severely raked stage, giving us the confidence to feel like we were an integral part of the highly visual production, and generally making us happy to come to work for long hours of physical labour. More personally, she praised my improvised crawling/writhing technique to the rest of the gang and gave me the confidence to lie under the stage more or less on top of four other crazies like me and wave my hands rhythmically for the length of a TV sitcom. Who wouldn’t admire a woman like that? Where else could I have such an amazing experience?
*******
The Canadian Opera Company winter season begins Saturday January 20th with Rigoletto, including the chorus, the orchestra, the singers: and supernumeraries such as John Allemang. For further information.
A scene from the Canadian Opera Company’s Rigoletto, 2011 (photo: Michael Cooper)
The musical Nine is a bit of a virtuoso vehicle, putting thirteen women, a man and a boy onstage together. The music & lyrics by Maury Yeston are never easy but quite rewarding, particularly if you have an actual orchestra, as we did tonight for the Podium Concert Productions presentation at the Trinity St Paul’s Centre, conducted by Mark Camilleri. Musicals with a full-sized orchestra and a big chorus seem to be an endangered species, considering how many times I’ve seen shows done with fewer than a dozen orchestral players, augmented by a keyboardist or two.
And no wonder that Nine isn’t presented very often. It’s hard, with several challenging roles & complex music. Based on Fellini’s film 8 ½ , this is a musical one can truly love: but one that isn’t yet well-known. Ah but the theatre was packed tonight, because getting a chance to hear this score is such a treat, including the numbers that were cut for the film. I saw lots of theatre people, including at least two directors who –if I don’t miss my guess—are thinking of ways to adapt this brilliant piece. Can it be reduced from its epic size? Perhaps, perhaps not (I don’t know). All I know is, that a chance to see it with all those people on stage – brilliant talented singers & actors –is a rarity, an opportunity that you must not miss if you’re an aficionado of musical theatre.
In 1982 I saw Nine on Broadway starring Raul Julia as the film director Guido Contini. Nine was adapted as a film in 2009 as a starring vehicle for Daniel Day Lewis. I swear that we get smarter the more often we put on a musical or opera, because the interpretative options are always greater the more times a work is staged, the more times we see solutions to the problems posed by a book and its score. I remember being irritated by a number in the Broadway production called “The Germans at the Spa”. It’s a definite tour de force, as the music is fast with lots of quick lines and oh my God suddenly we’re hearing the opening theme from Tristan und Isolde played by the orchestra. The Broadway solution was to have lots of movement, a frenetic moment onstage to match all the energy in the music: with the result that it was kind of stupid and unintelligible, as though the director was simultaneously showing off (“look at us! aren’t we impressive with the complex music we’re doing!”) while mocking the whole thing at the same time. If ever there were an argument for a concert performance that was it. Tonight I heard every note and every word of this wacky number, a piece that’s one of the ones missing from the film. Of course it’s cut from the film because it is a bit of a show-off piece that doesn’t advance the plot terribly much. And ditto for the operatic set-pieces in the second act, when Guido starts digging his way out of his predicament, attempting to make something to film. What an assortment of stunning pieces.
Juan Chioran is a three dimensional Guido. We get a flamboyant larger than life personality at the centre of the production, one who happens to sing better than I had expected. He has two more performances tomorrow, but I didn’t notice him holding anything back whatsoever. It’s a huge part. His self-portrait song is quite a marvelous creation, emerging conversationally in gentle singing, that gradually builds with more voice, more passion as it builds to sparkling high-notes, always clearly intelligible. The sound technicians had their work cut out for them, given the incredible range of vocal outputs, and orchestral accompaniments.
Sharing the stage with Chioran’s Guido are thirteen beautiful women. As this is done in concert it’s a very theatrical effect. When he’s soliloquizing sometimes they’re listening, heckling and even laughing at him, like a womanizer’s karma personified as though he’s on trial with this jury taking it all in. And yet they’re all admirers of varying degrees, mostly looking with affection rather than judgement, and at various points in the story, still responding in character even though they may be silent at that moment.
Kira Guloien portrays Carla Albanese
So if you have this visual, of thirteen beautiful women seated across the stage in front of the orchestra, it seems very disciplined, very orderly. And then early on we’re watching Kira Guloien sing Carla’s seductive song, wearing a tight dress and within short order, upside down on her little chair. And as a live performance, she had her own drama when her amplification fell loose from her dress – there was really nowhere to hide it, especially when she flipped upside down—and on top of all the skills on display (singing and enunciating while upside down performing acrobatics), she also had to catch the device, stay in character and keep singing as though it was all planned. That’s why we love live theatre.
Tracy Michailidis as Luisa Contini had the audience in the palm of her hand every time she sang, although her silent moments watching the performance were every bit as powerful. Rebecca Poff was one of the scary challenging presences onstage as Lillian la Feur first seeming to be his nemesis as his producer demanding results, then showing us her fantasies & her vulnerable side, in a voice perfectly suited to her Folies Bergere song, one of several highlights. Gabriel Mattka as the young Guido gets to sing a simple but powerful song near the end, a fabulous display of musicianship in one so young; no wonder he’s cast, both for his sympathetic portrayal but also his perfect intonation. There are no weak spots anywhere in this cast, a powerful group of voices all carefully prepared to sing this music idiomatically and with inspiration.
There are two performances Saturday January 13th –a matinee and evening performance—that I am unable to attend although I wish I could be there. The orchestra’s playing is magnificent especially in the warm confines of the Trinity St Paul’s space. This is a challenging score that needs lots of players to be properly heard. Oh how I wish Stratford or Shaw or Soulpepper or SOMEONE would notice what an amazing score this is, and produce it. It’s a challenging work requiring lots of talent. Podium Concert Productions didn’t take short-cuts that I could see or hear. Saturday’s performances are a rare opportunity that any music theatre fan, indeed any music fan, should seize if at all possible.
On the program it’s Hamlet but the font is struck through like this: H̶a̶m̶l̶e̶t̶.
I wondered, was this to be a musical? The advance description said
“Shakespeare’s best-known tragedy is reimagined on the Tarragon stage through the powerful lens of rock and roll.”
As someone who’s looking around like Diogenes for an honest piece of music theatre, looking under every rock, I’m open to just about anything, whether it’s
a musical like Nine (which I’ll be seeing this weekend),
an operetta like Candide which I saw twice in December,
an opera (what I was brought up on, what I still try to write),
a film using music in some capacity
or perhaps a play with music.
Before I attempt to describe Tarragon’s H̶a̶m̶l̶e̶t̶ (forgive me, but if I am going to speak about it, I need to put it into some context, right?), let me simply say, wow it works. That’s the best piece of theatre I’ve seen in awhile, and a very successful telling of the story. While Fortinbras’ framing is cut, nobody bids the soldiers [to] shoot, and there are no flights of angels singing anyone to their rest: but almost everything works at least as well or better than usual.
Noah Reid (Photo: Cylla von Tiedemann)
We’re watching something that might be called melodrama. Don’t let the word scare you, as I am simply invoking a technical term that is regularly misused. The lines are spoken with music underneath, much as we often encounter in film, and as theatres were wont to do in past centuries but not so much lately.
One reason that the practice likely stopped? Aha! because the popular music of the day wasn’t adequate to the task. This production features a happy marriage of our musical vernacular – the music that most people really know and love—with a story we also know and love. Topher Mokrzewski was talking about this not long ago, a theme I cited, in what’s perhaps wrong with some classical music. In a nutshell? H̶a̶m̶l̶e̶t̶ succeeds where so many modern compositions fail, because it connects in this way:
The reason pop music resonates with people is because it resonates with their personhood and experience….Music is, at its heart, the communication of the universal humanity which we all share and must be engaged at that crucial level, where all the senses we have at our disposal allow us to love it at our most common level.The two threads can be connected.
I’ll have to get Topher to come see this show.
Before I talk about the music, there’s a feature central to the mise-en-scène, that’s enormously interesting as a kind of symbol. Everyone steps to a microphone to sing or speak, sometimes walking with a hand-held, sometimes in a stand, not unlike your classic rock-band. It resembles a concert, or a musical or opera presented in concert. Whether it’s those first moments looking at the ghost from the battlements or Claudius & his court, or anyone else, the entire show is through a microphone: except for “to be or not to be”. Ostentation and the need to dissemble is front and centre, especially when it’s slick Claudius at the microphone.
Yes there are places where we have singing, particularly in the appearances of the players, the grave-digger, and Ophelia. Most other places the rock band underscores the delivery of lines, a broad range of different self-effacing feels, vamping and repeating, without calling too much attention to themselves, not unlike a good film score. At the ends of some scenes, the emotion suddenly explode in a climactic statement. I came prepared –that is with Kleenex to stuff in my ears if they were too loud—but the levels were perfect, just loud enough to grab you.
It might depend on how you understand this story, as to who would be your favourite: but I was mightily impressed that this rock-n-roll take on Shakespeare felt profoundly authentic, in the spirit of Meagher’s book Shakespeare’s Shakespeare. The musicians aren’t a bunch of bored technicians, outside the show. Nope. They’re integrated into the play, so much so that one can’t really tell which came first. Our grave-digger, played by Cliff Saunders, for instance was very much a Shakespearean clown, hollering and singing right into the audience, and doubled as Polonius, a broad portrayal of great fun. Our players? There’s a band onstage who turn up from beginning to end. Marcellus and Bernardo, solemnly helping spot the ghost from the battlements, but then showing us that yes they really can sing: as the Player and his Queen. Beau Dixon was maybe a bit more over-the-top in his heavy-metal screaming in The Murder of Gonzago, whereas Jack Nicholsen’s player was less rock idol and more the sympathetic actor. Tiffany Ayalik’s Ophelia is the most successful incarnation of that character I’ve seen in a very long time. Director Richard Rose gives everyone space to have their moment, but it’s especially clear with Ophelia, and in the last scene of the play.
Noah Reid and Tiffany Ayalik (Photo: Cylla von Tiedemann)
Let the audience look to their eyes.
Any Hamlet really sinks or swims on the backs of two people, and in fairness, this production leans heavily upon them. Noah Reid’s Hamlet feels very young, very vulnerable, rides the soliloquys when the music requires, but backs off and gives the lines a moment for us to hear what he’s saying. This is not a frenetic Hamlet but one where you seem to hear everything clearly. Is that perhaps because the score helps us focus on the lines that matter? That’s Rose’s doing and certainly the work of the composers (credited to the ensemble, so I’m not sure whom to credit) & performers. And Nigel Shawn Williams is a fascinating Claudius, not as threatening or scary as some I’ve seen, but indeed believable as the one who wins Gertrude, who has a sure hold on Denmark. I found the prayer sequence totally convincing, his occasional eruptions of fury beautifully connected to the person we’d come to know. Their interaction –Hamlet & Claudius—is endlessly fascinating to watch.
There are lots of other performers I could cite, but the main thing is to observe that this ensemble is tight, the music seeming to be emerging from the text rather than a latter-day addition.
H̶a̶m̶l̶e̶t̶ continues at Tarragon Theatre until February 11th . I would strongly recommend that you see it.
Podium Concert Productions, who will be presenting Nine in Concert January 12-13 describe the show this way:
Based on Italian director Federico Fellini’s comic masterpiece of biographical filmmaking, 8 1/2, Maury Yeston’s sultry and enchanting musical Nine follows the life of world-famous film director Guido Contini as he prepares his latest picture and balances the numerous women in his life. Contini is dreading his imminent 40th birthday and facing a midlife crisis, which is blocking his creative impulses and entangling him in a web of romantic difficulties in early-1960s Venice. Contini is also, after recent box office failures, drifting toward a nervous breakdown from which he is held back only by the support of his wife, Luisa. As his sanity disintegrates, he drifts into nostalgic reverie, eventually focusing on the formative sexual encounter of his life, which occurred at the age of nine.
Nine is a unique study of one obsessive man and the women surrounding him. He might remind you of Federico Fellini, just as Nine might remind you of his film 8 ½. After interviewing Juan Chioran, who plays Guido Contini I thought it might be fun to turn the process on its head, asking the women about Guido.
Kira Guloien portrays Carla Albanese
A-Who are you (who are you) and
B-What is your relationship to Italian film director Guido Contini?
CARLA (Kira Guloien: Doctor Zhivago (Broadway), Mrs. Walker in Tommy (Stratford), Young Edie in Grey Gardens (Acting Upstage)):
A) My name is Carla Albanese and I am a romantic, playful, hot-blooded and highly emotional woman. Sadly, I am married to a nice man named Luigi who leaves me feeling terribly bored and unsatisfied. I believe that life should be full of passion and that love (and love-making) makes the world go round.
B) I am Guido’s lover and future wife. I am his confidante, best friend and the person he comes to when he needs rejuvenation.
LILIANE (Rebecca Poff: Showboat (Broadway and 1st National Tour), Phantom (Livent)):
A) Liliane LaFleur. A former star and then owner of The Folies Bergeres in Paris. She is now a mature woman who is a producer, lives in Paris and has currently signed Guido to produce a movie musical. She is tough, experienced, sharp, worldly, wealthy, talented and famous and still has a twinkle in her eye.
B) I do not know Guido well, but I do know his work. I thought he would be the perfect director for a film that the world needs now…..a Movie Musical to save us from the current trend of existentialism in film direction. As the story progresses she realizes that he is in crisis and may very well not even be able to complete the project as he has not even completed the script
MAMMA (Barbara Mantini: Featured Soprano with numerous symphonies. 20 years with The Mantini Sisters)
A) I am Guido’s mother
B)- I appear in flash backs of Guido’s life and as a vision
Tracy Michailidis portrays Luisa Contini
LUISA (Tracy Michailidis: Beauty and The Beast (Broadway), Fun Home (Broadway National Tour)):
A) Luisa, Guido’s wife.
B) I was an actress. Now, I’m his PR person.
Who is Guido Contini?
CARLA: The greatest filmmaker in the entire world. The greatest lover in the entire world. He can be playful, childish and sensitive yet macho, virile and masculine. He has an intense hunger for physical affection, which I am always happy to provide.
LILIANE: Guido is an artistic visionary whose creative voice not only entertains, but also inspires and moves his moviegoers.
MAMMA: My son Guido is a film maker. But, I don’t really understand what his films are about, there is no real plot that I can make out, and they always seem to be full of sex and women. That makes it difficult to talk about them with my friends and family
LUISA:He is a child in a grown man’s body who needs external validation constantly to survive. He is also the love of my life.
Why is Guido here at the spa?
CARLA: Guido is very stressed and he needed some time away from the pressure of his producer and his wife. I suppose she decided to follow him here, unfortunately. He, of course, will be very relieved if I pop by for a surprise rendezvous. I always know how to relax him, and we will brainstorm ideas for his film together. I am one of the only people he has told about his new film… his wife doesn’t even know about it.
Rebecca Poff portrays Liliane La Feur
LILIANE: Guido told me he is at the spa to scout a location for this film, but I have my doubts about that.
MAMMA: Guido needs a break from working so hard.
LUISA: He’s finding himself; isn’t that what they call it?
What does Guido need to do in his next film?
CARLA: Guido obviously needs to make a come back from his last few flops. The problem is that he hasn’t been living a truthful life. To make good art, you must be truthful. Guido needs to be brave, put his needs first, leave Luisa and follow his heart (to me) in order to free himself to create another masterpiece.
LILIANE: In short, Guido needs to triumph. His last three films were flops and he needs to redeem himself.
MAMMA: Perhaps if he created a film that everyone could enjoy with their families and friends. A movie about life…something that makes you feel good at the end of it.
LUISA: Perhaps if he had a complete and utter breakdown he would stop chasing other women. Perhaps he would see me standing next to him, as I have been, all these years.
If I promise that Guido Contini reads this, what would you tell him?
CARLA: Guido, my divorce will be final very soon. Then we can get married and you will see that I will be an incredibly supportive wife. I will never, ever judge you for prioritizing your art. If you choose love, everything else will fall into place. I promise.
LILIANE: Get your shit together or else I will destroy you.
Barbara Mantini portrays Guido’s Mother
MAMMA: I would tell him to shape up and start behaving like a real man. Take care of his wife, be there for her, raise a family. Not make these terrible films that in the end will destroy him and his marriage. There is more to life than public attention and money.
LUISA: I would tell him that his wife is smarter than he thinks.
What song do you sing?
CARLA: “A Call from the Vatican” shows that Guido and I know how to have a really good time together. We have chemistry that he doesn‘t have with anyone else, and I never get upset when he comes to be tired and overworked. I LOVE tending to his every need and by the time I am done with him, he always feels like a million dollars.
LILIANE: My song is “Folies Bergeres”. It is an homage to the life of beauty and spectacle that exists inside the club. It is about a place where magic and love is always possible and where joy abounds and human frailties are forgotten. Somewhere during the song, it becomes a flashback and Liliane is once again the star of the show and is holding the audience in the palm of her hand and loving every moment of it. Perhaps she is trying somewhat to convince Guido that her vision for the film is right, but in the end she is a woman who knows what she wants and what she values and she will make it happen.
MAMMA: I sing the song “Nine”. I love and cherish my son. He was my ninth child, ninth son and also the ninth grandchild in the family. So, when he turned nine, we celebrated him and his future. But, after his ninth birthday something happened that changed his behaviour.
LUISA: I sing two songs; “My Husband Makes Movies”, and “Be On Your Own”. The first is sung about my husband, and the second is sung to him. The first one is sung to the press, and the second is personal; just me and him. I am alone with or without him. I still love him, but my own self-preservation is threatening to break, so I must leave. Or, first, I must sing. From the recent film adaptation:
Why are you the one who knows Guido best?
CARLA: Our love is the best thing for his art. The fire between us ignites his creativity and I am able to strip away all of this outer layers until I expose the vulnerable artist that lies within. Then, he tells me everything. Guido is completely and utterly Guido when he is with me.
LILIANE: Not applicable
MAMMA: I raised Guido from birth. I know his soul. But, he has been so distracted with life that he hides his real self from the world.
LUISA: Because I swore I would love him for better or for worse. Because I’ve seen him weak and ugly, mute and in despair. And I still love him.
MAMMA:…this show is full of beautiful music and tells the story of my beloved son… THANK YOU
*****
NINE in Concert will be presented at Trinity-St. Paul’s Centre for the Arts on January 12 and 13, 2018. A world-class orchestra of 23 musicians, hand-picked and led by Mark Camilleri, will accompany 15 of Canada’s brightest stars of stage and musical theatre and an ensemble of rising stars from Etobicoke School of The Arts. Further information .
My second visit to the Guloien Theatre at Streetcar Crowsnest was very different from my last one, entranced by Musik für das Ende, the world and work of Claude Vivier last fall. While it’s a different sort of magic, the excitement was if anything more intense this time, swept up in Kristen Thomson’s The Wedding Party.
While her name is on the play, on Crow’s website one reads that it’s “based on the characters created with Trish Lindström, Tony Nappo, Moya O’Connell, Tom Rooney, and Bahia Watson.” Lindström, O’Connell & Rooney are back, joined by Jason Cadieux, Virgilia Griffith and Jane Spidell. Thomson’s very humble note in the program shares credit for the creation:
Four years ago, I invited some of my favourite actors –Trish Lindström,, Tony Nappo, Moya O’Connell, Tom Rooney, Bahia Watson—to improvise with me around a fascination with weddings, witnessing, belief and the echoes of these experiences in performance.
Playwright Kristen Thomson, Tom Rooney, Jason Cadieux (Photo: Guntar Kravis)
Six actors create more than a dozen characters. Or at least I think so. Of the six, four play at least part of the time as the opposite gender and/or a different race and age. At one point we hear the old lady onstage sagely intone that she hates to see men dress up as women: and of course there’s a hilarious gasp of recognition when we remember that she’s actually being played by a guy. Forgive me, that’s the one joke I’ll give away, and indeed I bet you will still laugh at the delivery & the irony if you come see it. There are several such wise moments, spoken with such dignity that it doesn’t play as comedy. When they’re falling down, insulting one another, groping and misbehaving? yes, then we’re into territory that’s recognizably farcical. But much of the time it’s much gentler, less a written / contrived thing than something that unfolds organically out of the situations and the character dynamics.
And yet there’s such authenticity that it often feels like reality TV. I have to be careful as a regular CNN watcher, someone cringing at the lies we see every day, that the epithet I just used – reality TV–be understood as a compliment and not as a profound insult. But we’re in a world stripped of the usual theatrical ostentation, watching people muddle through, doing innocuous little things, trying to get through the next 30 seconds without screwing up or falling on your face: and failing miserably at even that tiny little objective. Everyone is human, all too human, and that’s why it’s so funny. I felt at times as though I was watching a living breathing inkblot test, in the sense that every ten seconds or so someone in the audience was screaming with wild uncontrollable laughter, while ¾ of the audience sat and watched, gathering it together for their own explosion of laughter. Why laugh here and not there? I think the show is a mirror to our dysfunctions, a reminder of what we’ve seen in our own families. From time to time the laughter gets so overpowering that every little twitch sets us off. But then for awhile the characters become as still as the bystanders at the side of the road staring at a big pileup on the highway. At times it’s an ongoing slow-motion train-wreck, very much like life itself. At times it becomes surreal and dream-like, but for the most part we’re in the presence of real people, speaking in average tones rather than big voices.
Tom Rooney and Moya O’Connell (Photo: Guntar Kravis)
And yet I was reminded of French farce, thinking of Feydeau or Anouilh, with the magnificent intricacy of what we watched. For me Thomson’s world is a much more real slice of life than what we’d find from either of those authors, which is to say, not seeming so artificial, not so contrived. Is that because she observes something true to a Torontonian / Canadian sensibility? Or because what she wrote has been brought to life so vividly by her cast as well as director Chris Abraham? I don’t know, I have no idea how they could create such a mirror that I looked into, that made me laugh so much and so often.
On the first page of the program there’s a whiff of city-building in Chris Abraham’s welcome to the second year in this marvelous new facility. Here we are, at a theatre truly in the east end, the beginning of something. I suppose that’s inaccurate, Crow’s Theatre have been around for over 30 years (or so the internet tells me), and so this is an evolution rather than a beginning. Abraham seems to be all about partnerships. The Vivier was a marriage of drama & music, in partnership with Soundstreams. The Wedding Party is brought back, I now realize, not for its second incarnation but third, when we include its premiere via Talk is Free Theatre in Barrie, that I meant to attend but missed, just over a year ago. Co-productions & partnerships are not just the way of the future, but indeed have long been the modus operandi for many companies in the Toronto area.
But excuse me if I sound so serious & philosophical after laughing my ass off tonight. The delights of The Wedding Party await you at the Guloien Theatre at the Streetcar Crowsnest until January 20th.
New Company Stages Canadian Premieres of Jake Heggie Holocaust Operas in Partnership with North America’s Largest Conservative Jewish Congregation
Another Sunrise and Farewell, Auschwitz to be staged by
the Electric Bond Opera Ensemble at Beth Tzedec
TORONTO – The Electric Bond Opera Ensemble, an exciting, new Toronto-based company presents Jake Heggie’s Another Sunrise & Farewell, Auschwitz, two one-act operas of survival.
The works will be staged by Aaron Willis (Soulpepper, Theatre Passe Muraille, Tarragon & Co-Artistic Director of Convergence Theatre), in new productions designed by Jennifer
Goodman, at Beth Tzedec Congregation in Toronto. Michael Shannon (Tapestry Opera,
Canadian Opera Company), will lead an ensemble of five acclaimed, Toronto-based
instrumentalists from the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, including Mark Skazinetsky, Eric Braley, Igor Gefter and Michael Chiarello. The cast will feature rising and established Toronto-based singers, soprano Sara Schabas, mezzo-soprano Georgia Burashko and baritone Sean Watson.
With a libretto by Gene Scheer (Moby Dick, Three Decembers, Grammy-nominee), the two one-act operas centre around Krystyna Zywulska, the Polish dissident, writer and
Auschwitz-survivor. Born Jewish with the name Sonia Landau, she took on the name and
identity Krystyna Zywulska in 1943 under interrogation by the Gestapo, reclaiming her Jewish heritage much later in life. The works explore her memories of survival in the camps, brought to life through musical allusions and vibrant settings of the poetry she wrote in Auschwitz that kept her alive.
“Memory is a very tricky thing,” composer Jake Heggie said in an interview with the Jewish News (Northern California). “Trying to define dramatic, emotional moments in our life with words is very difficult, which is why songs and opera are the best way to explore, because they give it emotional context.”
Jake Heggie’s music has been acclaimed for both its complexity and its accessibility, touching audiences both familiar and unfamiliar with the genre. Music director Michael Shannon notes, “This achingly beautiful score transports us into the mind of someone haunted by memories so traumatic, they defy description. The music features Heggie’s trademark lyricism along with integrating many different styles, including nods to Chopin, which invite us all to remember along with her.”
The operas will be performed in Beth Tzedec Congregation’s Herman Hall, transformed into a playing space that will take us back into Krystyna’s memories of her life in the camp, brought to life by designer Jennifer Goodman.
“The presentation is in line with Beth Tzedec’s commitment to creating innovative ways of engaging with important topics that are relevant to the community,” Yacov Fruchter, Beth Tzedec’s director of community building and spiritual engagement, describes. “I am excited to be working with an incredible team of young talent who are experimenting so bravely and beautifully with how to present the complexity of the Holocaust through their art form.”
The Canadian premiere performances will take place on February 10, 2018 at 8pm and February 11, 2018 at 2pm, at Beth Tzedec Congregation (1700 Bathurst St., Toronto).
For more information or for tickets, please visit: www.anothersunrise.ca or call 416-781-3511.
ABOUT Electric Bond Opera Ensemble
Toronto’s Electric Bond Opera Ensemble aims to present classical and operatic works that tell untold stories, reminding audiences and performers of the “electric bond of being” (Thomas Huxley) by which we are united. The group is founded by Toronto-based soprano Sara Schabas, who recently organized three fundraising recitals to bring Syrian refugees to Canada, and has performed and worked with musical charities Songs by Heart (Chicago), Sharing Notes (Chicago), and at Baycrest Hospital in Toronto. Another Sunrise / Farewell, Auschwitz comprises the group’s first fully staged production.
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“Press releases and announcements” are presented verbatim without comment.
It’s the same for Episode VIII as in IV, V, VI, as it was in I, II, III and more recently in VII. No this isn’t a spoiler. No I won’t give anything away.
I just saw the most recent Star Wars film. They may have lost Carrie Fisher aka Princess Leia, they may have killed off assorted characters, but the franchise is alive and well so long as they have their MVC: Most Valuable Composer.
John Williams continues to deepen the complex text he began with Star Wars aka Episode IV: A New Hope that first appeared in 1977. With each new episode, it may be true that there were lots of characters and incidents, but there weren’t that many new themes. Instead, we heard themes we’d heard before but in subtler versions, transformed. So where Darth Vader’s theme was originally the big loud imperial march, it continues to rear its head subtly, like a bad dream. There are themes for The Force, for Princess Leia, and more recently, a theme for the Rebellion against The Empire.
I’m not a big fan of the series. Other than Episode V, I didn’t like any of the other films: until now that is. The newest episode is the first one that has the same depths as The Empire Strikes Back. I won’t say anything more about it, other than to observe that the best moments in both films are helped by Williams.
That’s pretty amazing when you consider that he’s been writing these scores for literally 40 years. Eight films, and that’s just the Star Wars series. He’s been in on other franchises such as the Indiana Joneses, the Homes Alone, the Parks Jurassic, Oliver Stone’s president movies (JFK and Nixon), the first of the Harry Potter films, and lots more individual films.
Before any of those, came something much smaller and might be William’s trademark.
Two notes.
They might be the simplest tune ever written. Can we even call it a tune? “Melody” is usually understood as something pretty, beautiful rather than something scary.
But most people can hum the tune, even though the film is over 40 years old. Even without the visuals, the music is a powerful evocation of the film.
John Williams wrote the music for Jaws (1975). Nowadays when the music is played—as it was at a Toronto Symphony concert full of Williams’s film scores —the audiences burst into nervous laughter. But back then it wasn’t quite so funny. I remember people being afraid underwater: even in swimming pools! I know what you’re thinking, sharks aren’t usually found in chlorinated water.
It was a kind of mass hysteria.
In March, the Toronto Symphony will present Jaws with live orchestral accompaniment: three times. It’s a thrilling experience, seeing a film with an orchestra playing the soundtrack live in a big hall such as Roy Thomson Hall. What I find especially wonderful is that the TSO are calling it “Jaws In Concert”. In fact that’s arguably what all sound cinema is, right? A big loud orchestral soundtrack that accompanies a film illustrates and amplifies the emotional arc of the story. If you can’t already tell from the images or dialogue when to be afraid, when to be sad, or when to be elated, the orchestra tells you. It’s what Wagner used to do in his operas, and is the essence of the average film-score.
Done live in a concert hall, it’s that much more powerful.
And it has become a regular thing. Each year the TSO does more and more of these presentations, and the audiences are growing steadily. People seem to have noticed that one of the most exciting thing about film is the music.
Music and Film is the title of a course I teach at the University of Toronto’s School of Continuing Studies, beginning Wednesday January 17th. It’s normal to study a medium through its artists, right? We study painting by looking at painters, acting by paying close attention to actors, ballet through its dancers.
What about cinema? It’s been usual to focus on directors or star actors, even though there are many different artists in different disciplines who are responsible for a feature film. It’s just a figure of speech when I speak of “film music as a lens”. The picture that’s brought into focus is cinema and its history, illuminated for us by attention to the music, in much the same way we’d do it with actors or directors. In fact we’re just doing the usual sort of thing, but it’s still a relatively new area of study. The best theoretical books are still relatively recent, and there’s still lots to learn and to discuss.
And as a new subject it can surprise people with its insights.
And whether or not you notice the film’s score, the industry took notice a very long time ago. It’s usually far more lucrative to score a feature film you’d see in a theatre than a symphony that you’d encounter in the concert hall: although the concert hall is now becoming a place to find film music too.
Sometimes the song or symphonic poem was already created and well-known before the film was created.
Sometimes it’s a new composition just for the story being told. Jaws in Concert will be presented March 21, 22 and 23 by the Toronto Symphony at Roy Thomson Hall.
Ave atque vale 2017. And thank goodness the year is ending.
While it may have included some celebratory moments –the Sesquicentennial of Canadian Confederation and my father’s 100th birthday—I felt a grim shadow hanging over everything.
Can there be any doubt that Donald Trump is Man of the Year? Nevermind a “person of the year”, his gender is front and centre. If they gave a “pussy-grabber of the year” award he’d win, hands down (excuse the pun). While Harvey Weinstein et al have been outed and confronted, one can’t help noticing that the role-model-in-chief is still at it, still baiting and trolling and commanding the largest arsenal in the world.
So as Beethoven might have said: oh friends, not in that tone…
Let’s be celebratory. Eat drink and be merry, because soon the holidays are over and maybe just maybe that scary shadow will start a war to ensure that he can’t be removed from office. Ha, I first typed it as “removed from orifice” which might be just as accurate.
My purpose in this annual space is multiple:
I need to observe passages, to welcome those arriving and to thank those who are leaving. While they may not be completely gone yet, I can’t help noticing that multiple artists are coming to the close of their tenure, and at times seem to be making programming choices that are somewhat valedictory in nature: which is one motivation for the headline “ave atque vale” (or “hail & farewell”).
And I want to properly honour those who moved me the most this year. If anyone seems to be missing, I plead “busy” as I have lots on my plate and so had to miss more than a few things.
Hail and farewell to these three stars:
1) Matthew Jocelyn of Canadian Stage.
I think it’s fair to say that no one in Toronto has had more of a hand in so many of my most exciting / inspiring evenings than he. The programming at Canadian Stage has been wonderfully eclectic, international, and daring. This past year I can point to
The Return, from Australian troupe Circa led by Yaron Lifschitz,
and
Triptyque from Québec’s 7 doigts de la main just to name three oddball multi-disciplinary works.
In his last few months we can look forward to:
Declarations (theatre & movement) from Jordan Tannahill in January
He who falls (celui qui tombe) on the boundary between physical theatre & circus, from Yoann Bourgeois March 1-4
Voices3: in this body, music & dance, Fides Krucker (and others), March 14-18,
then
Voices3: Tanya Tagaq + Laakkuluk Williamson Bathory March 22-24
The Overcoat: a musical tailoring Morris Panych & James Rolfe, March 27 – April 14 (opera? We shall see)
The return of Crystal Pite’s BetroffenheitApril 19-22
This is not a complete list.
2) Peter Oundjian of the Toronto Symphony has a few months left at the helm.
It’s been announced that Sir Andrew Davis will act as Interim Artistic Director for two seasons following the conclusion of Peter Oundjian’s 14-year tenure as Music Director at the end of the 2017/18. There’s the matter of the exciting programming so far this season and still to come, plus the concerts led by Oundjian himself. Concerts of note so far this season? I missed a ton this fall, only catching the Tribute to Maureen Forrester. Notable concerts to come include the concert performance of Bernstein’s Candide I’ve mentioned coming April 26 & 28, And Oundjian himself? He’s back in January to conduct Mozart, and will be at the heart of the New Creations Festival March 3–10, 2018, a series of favourites from past festivals. Other highlights I’m eager to hear include a visit from Leon Fleischer in May and a month-long celebration, concerts in June to conclude his tenure including a Mahler’s 9th June 20-23 and Beethoven’s 9th June 28–30, 2018.
3) David Fallis of Toronto Consort steps down as Artistic Director after the 2017-18 season, although I believe he’ll continue with Opera Atelier.
I want to mention two wonderful concerts: Kanatha/Canada: First Encounters and Cavalli’s Elena. Considering the comparative size, budgets and international scope of Canadian Stage or the TSO, on the one hand, and the Toronto Consort on the other, it’s remarkable that Fallis’ work can be spoken of in the same breath. I only wish I had more time to see more. Still to come this season? Illuminations March 2 & 3, 2018; Quicksilver presents Fantasticus April 13 & 14, 2018, and Monteverdi’s Orfeo in May 25-26-27.
4) And then there’s the arrival of Elisa Citterio at Tafelmusik this season, the beginning of a new era for that ensemble.
I’m looking forward to hearing so many concerts with her and Tafelmusik, especially an upcoming concert where she’ll be playing Beethoven’s violin concerto. I wish we could have more romantic music played by this wonderful ensemble.
Great performances of the year? In addition to the ones I singled out already, there are a few more.
The Canadian Opera Company’s most impressive moment was again early in the calendar year, another Wagner opera. Götterdämmerung featured some amazing work from Christine Goerke, Ain Anger, Robert Pomakov, and the trio of Danika Loren, Lauren Eberwein and Lindsay Ammann as the Rhine-Maidens. Most impressive of all was Johannes Debus in the pit leading the COC orchestra, in some of their finest playing to date.
Strongest impression without singing? Billy Merasty onstage in Louis Riel, an opera that I think could be re-named “Peter Hinton’s Louis Riel”¸ in recognition of the director’s work redeeming a troubling opera. When I remember the way the opera opened in the original –a single voice telling us of Riel sitting in his stolen chair using his stolen knives—it seemed to underline the criminality with which Riel’s name was besmirched, right down to his execution. Hinton re-balanced the work, giving that same song to Jani Lauzon, revising the harshness of that song, in a soft aura of compassion and love. I wonder if it can be presented again without his gloss: without the additional layers that mitigate the offenses and mis-steps of the original score & libretto? While I give full marks to Alexander Neef for bringing in Hinton & turning him loose to re-invent Riel, I want to especially remember Merasty, Lauzon and Hinton.
I’ll never forget Ambur Braid in the opening performance of Magic Flute tripping over her own dress, and being such a canny theatre animal, creating something so new & daring that I think I was the only one –other than those in the show—who knew it wasn’t intentional. She seemed to be crawling on her knees to attack Tamino. Hair-raising. Brilliant. Sexy. She was the best thing in that show.
Zubin Mehta leading the Israel Philharmonic? Heaven. Their Heldenleben was an extraordinary tour de force, faster than anyone ever does it, and every internal voice clearly articulated.
James Ehnes’s solo concert in the summer was unforgettable, impeccable.
The Toy Piano composers CD launch concert was magic. The first piece by Elisha Denburg incorporated a Fisher-Price toy that made the two year old in the front row squeal with rapture. I’ll never forget that moment.
The Bach St Mark Passion? There are reconstituted versions, and we got to hear one this year with a wonderful cast.
Bicycle Opera’s Sweat, a work of great integrity, both in its music, its drama and above all its politics for August.
Bravest work of the year? Perhaps the heroic job undertaken by Natalya Gennadi as Oksana G in Tapestry’s premiere production of the new opera in May. This would be tough enough with lots of preparation time, rather than as it was: undertaken with relatively short notice.
Opera Atelier’s Medée in April gave us a far edgier take on the work than previously. I love that they always dig deeper every time they revive an opera.
Opera 5 gave us an interesting two works by Dame Ethel Smythe, a program entitled Suffragette in June.
I need to thank Against the Grain for putting me in touch with TIFF, whose festival of films by Straub & Huillet in the late winter represented several of the highlights of the year, including their own live performances alongside some films.
Finally, as far as the future, I want to pick up a conversational thread that I pretended to ignore on Facebook recently. Topher Mokrzewski posted the following on Facebook Dec 21st.
The reason pop music resonates with people is because it resonates with their personhood and experience.If classical music is to succeed at all in the 21st century, it’ll be because we’ve a) made the case that people can identify with the works of these composers of the past and b) that we identify, as performers, as strongly as possible with the sentiments in these works as we might if it WAS pop music. That applies doubly to new works. Every performance is NEW. If classical works aren’t felt at that deepest level of universal personhood- notwithstanding the great musical arguments for why they are important- classical music will not fundamentally be important enough to talk about. Music is, at its heart, the communication of the universal humanity which we all share and must be engaged at that crucial level, where all the senses we have at our disposal allow us to love it at our most common level.The two threads can be connected.
Two relatively famous artists posted disagreements, I won’t take this up with them.
I’m inclined not just to agree with Topher, but to want to see where this might lead, creatively and otherwise. Just this week my wife & I saw Bernstein’s Candide, the second time I’ve seen it in December (earlier by TIFT in Barrie). I will now admit something that I studiously omitted from either review. While I admire much in both of these productions, I am very conflicted about this work. As the output from a committee it doesn’t argue for the value of collaboration. I suppose it’s better than the Yellow River Concerto, and yes I want to see what the TSO does with it in April. What impresses me with Bernstein is how much of his music is singable and/or hummable. Since posting it to Facebook a few weeks ago I can’t stop running that overture through my head complete with the composer’s quirky dance-moves.
I submit that many of the greatest works up to the year 1900 were full of hummable music. Remember that moment in Amadeus when the confessor thinks that Salieri wrote Eine Kleine Nachtmusik?
My point in quoting this, is to suggest that something as popular as this, or Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” is a wholly different sort of thing from what we’ve seen so often in the 20th century, where art –meaning music, theatre, painting and all of the arts—seemed to lose interest in popular taste. It’s a sad commentary that some operas written in the 20th century are spoken of as “box office poison”. Meanwhile, composers such as Puccini or Rachmaninoff or Richard Strauss who were not only hummable but managed to be commercially successful did so sometimes at the expense of critical approval, as though their success proved that they had sold out. Joseph Kerman for instance opened a can of critical whoop-ass on Puccini over Tosca, a critique I find profoundly stupid. (and I’m happy to step outside with anyone who wants to go toe-to-toe on this one). So the challenge I offer to Topher or anyone else willing to take it up, is this. Given the occasional attempts to reconcile popular and classical –for instance Tapestry’s Tap Ex Metallurgy in 2015, or the three years of Electric Messiah from Soundstreams, who’s next? To be honest, I hope to undertake something of my own this year, but won’t talk about it until I’m certain that it’s going to happen.
Finally? In the interest of salvaging something light & comic from something heavy and ridiculously long, I’d like to repeat my favourite headline of the year from April.
Tonight was the first of six performances of Leonard Bernstein’s Candide, running on consecutive weekends (evenings of Dec 28 & 30 Jan 5 & 6, matinees of Dec 31 & Jan 7), presented at the Bluma Appel Theatre by Toronto Operetta Theatre (TOT).
2018 is the Bernstein Centennial, so get ready for lots of his music. For example, in addition to this production the Toronto Symphony will be offering a concert performance of Candide in April.
It’s a problematic work, much loved in several versions. In aiming for satire & deep thoughts there are times when the work appeals more to the mind than to the heart, particularly at the end when I think for all Bernstein’s ambitions he could have done better.
There are at least two ways to come at Candide. If you cast actors who sing you may get conviction & intelligibility, but at the expense of the music. If you cast singers who act, you may get beautiful melodies, but at the expense of good theatre. And there’s also the question of tone (edgy satire or farcical comedy?), one that can go in either direction. With too much drama –actors rather than comedians—they may win the battle for verisimilitude while losing the war for our hearts by being too real.
TOT come deliberately from the musical side, using performers whose voices are bigger than average, even if that means they then resemble old-fashioned operetta or musical-theatre. They wouldn’t look out of place in a Hollywood musical of the 1950s.
“I am easily assimilated”: Elizabeth Beeler with company and Tonatiuh Abrego–right– as Candide (photo: Gary Beechey)
Speaking of irony, that means that they’re not hitting you over the head with the politics or the edginess of the story, and so they produce a gentler, sweeter comedy than what I experienced in the lean adaptation I saw a few weeks ago in Barrie, one that leaned much more towards deep thoughts and philosophy.
Sometimes less is more.
Tonatiuh Abrego
Director Guillermo Silva-Marin filled the TOT stage with beautiful young bodies. Handsome Toniatuh Abrego has a lovely light tenor and a very gentle delivery, highly sympathetic in the title role. Vania Lisbeth Chan was an attractive Cunegonde, Kimberley-Rose Pefhany a comical Paquette, Nicholas Borg a strong and professional presence as Voltaire/Pangloss.
Elizabeth Beeler stole the show as the Old Lady, always interesting and hard to ignore: although maybe the part is written that way.
Conductor Derek Bate
There were times that the stage was full of personnel, all ably prepared for singing, dancing, and telling the story.
It’s from the musical side though that the TOT Candide really works best, prepared & conducted by Derek Bate. From the moment the overture began we were listening to a precise & accurate performance of great integrity, full of energy & at times seeming to raise the roof. The chorus of voices was always full & committed, the effect bold & straight to the heart.
barczablog 