Opera Atelier’s  production of (mostly) Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas opened last night at the Elgin.  I say “(mostly) Purcell” because director Marshall Pynkoski had decided to add a Prologue.  As he explained in his introductory remarks nobody reads Virgil’s Aeneid anymore so it was necessary to play out the back story in a prologue.  I find this pretty patronising.  It’s not a particularly convoluted story and I would have thought that the gist of the story is well enough known to most opera goers and, you know, some of us have read the Aeneid.  Besides, even without detailed knowledge of the back story there’s nothing remotely hard to understand.  FWIW the dumbing down carried over into the surtitles with, for example, “Anchises” rendered as “his father”.  Anyway we got a prologue spoken by Irene Poole while the orchestra played other Purcell airs followed by a bit of extraneous ballet and poor Chris Enns (Aeneas) and Wallis Giunta (Dido) running around making the stock baroque “woe is me” gesture.  I guess it made the piece (plus Marshall’s speech) long enough to justify an intermission, which was taken after what is usually Act 2 Scene 1, but the prologue was neither necessary nor welcome and I think the ensuing intermission was an unnecessary break in the flow of the action.

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