Dragon’s Tale; music by Chan Ka Nin, text by Mark Brownell, premiered at Harbourfront last night. It’s a rather clever mash up of two stories which, taken together, address how we face the future without abandoning the past or, alternatively, getting stuck in it. The first story concerns a young Chinese Canadian woman in Toronto, Xiao Lian, whose widowed father is dying. She is torn between her desire to “get a life” and his obsessive insistence that the “old ways”, meaning essentially here looking after him, come first.
So on a grungy corner of Dundas and Ossington lies a grungy cellar dive; the Dakota Tavern. It’s not an obvious place to do opera though a mash up of opera and burlesque is more plausible. And so that’s what we got from the Opera Revue crew (Alexander Hajek, Danie Friesen and Claire Harris) and four burlesque dancers.
Last night saw the first of two performances of Haydn’s rarely performed 1791 work Orfeo: L’anima del filosofo. I know how much effort and indeed passion went into creating this production and the singing is pretty good. I wish I could say I enjoyed it but I can’t. There were just too many issues.
