The Canadian Children’s Opera Company is reviving Dean Burry’s adaptation of JRR Tolkien’s The Hobbit on its twentieth anniversary.  The first performance was on Friday evening at the Harbourfront Centre Theatre.  It’s really quite an achievement to condense a 320pp novel into an 80 minute opera respecting the constraints of writing mostly for young voices.  It’s clever.  It’s structured as twelve discrete scenes and most of the singing is choral.  Groups of performers; essentially sorted by age cohort, represent the various “tribes” of Middle Earth; hobbits, humans, elves, dwarves etc.  There are a limited number of solo roles and dialogue is used rather than recitative so exposed solo singing is kept to a minimum.  This all provides meaningful roles for lots of performers without creating “impossible to cast” ones.

The “orchestra” is made up of piano (Claire Harris), violin (Kathleen Kajioka), cello (Rebecca Morton) and a very large array of percussion instruments (Hoi Tong Keung).  It provides loads of colour without any risk of overpowering the voices.  It’s all skilfully co-ordinated by Terri Dunn on the podium.

Production values are very high.  It uses a unit set effectively and the costuming and lighting design are excellent.  Some high points would be the way the lighting is used to indicate Bilbo’s invisibility and the rather wonderful puppet used for the dragon Smaug.  Also the very spidery spiders!  Alison Grant’s direction is tight and efficiently moves large numbers of performers on, off and around a far from spacious stage.

The performances are really good.  The many different choruses are well drilled.  The six young ladies playing elf maidens are particularly good.  The most pivotal solo role is that of Bilbo and it was handled very nicely by Leo Kemeny-Wodlinger (there are multiple cast changers for the second half of the run) who was particularly good in his “transformation” scenes.  Lilia Javanrouh-Givi, complete with rather spectacular beard, was suitably obnoxious as the greedy Thorin Oakenshield and there was some very preciousss slipping and sliming from Frida Frederiksen-Marsiaj as Gollum.  The one adult on stage; Doug MacNaughton playing Gandalf and voicing Smaug, was also very effective.  But really it’s an ensemble show and a long list of everyone who everybody who did a fine job would be tedious because they all did.

There’s really a lot to like in this show and at eighty minutes it doesn’t outlast it’s welcome.  There are two further performances on Saturday and one on Sunday.