Category Archives: Performance review – miscellaneous

Opera 5 do Hahn and Offenbach

Posted on by
Reply

Opera 5’s latest show presents two rarely seen French one act operas.  First up was Reynaldo Hahn’s  1897 work L’île du rêve.  It’s one of those French officer falls in love with beautiful sixteen year old girl on tropical island and then “duty” calls and he dumps her and she dies of a broken heart pieces.  The only twist is that here he offers to take her back to France but the ruling princess advises her that, away from the island, she will lose her charms and he’ll come to despise her so she doesn’t.  A touch of French worldliness colouring this rather overdone plot device perhaps?  The staging, by Aria Umezawa, is fairly simple though clearly a lot of thought went into how to make the intimate scenes between the principals work.  There are also some rather beautiful projections involved.

O5-Offenbach & Hahn-L'ile 1 Continue reading →

Obeah Opera

Posted on by
5

brooksObeah Opera is an ambitious work using music, words and dance to explore some aspects of the 17th century Salem witch trials through the eyes of enslaved African women.  It’s being presented by Nightwood Theatre and Culchaworks Arts Collective as part of the New Groundswell Festival.  The central character is Tituba, a traditional healer and practitioner of Obeah; a traditional religion or system of magic.  The narrative takes us through the transportation of the women from Barbados to be sold in Salem and their lives as domestic servants to the pivotal point where Tituba saves the life of the sick daughter of the local minister and is accused of witchcraft.  Along the way we get some very high energy action from the large cast, especially where African themes are explored.  It’s an all female cast and the music is all sung a capella.  This was also a workshop of a work in progress intended for the arts festival at next year’s Pan-Am games so last night did not represent the finished product.

Continue reading →

And so it begins

Posted on by
2

teiyaSo, after the rather scattered events of the summer last night’s fundraiser for Opera 5 at Atelier Rosemarie Umetsu felt like the start of a new season.  It was well attended and organised in an intriguing and fun format.  Basically, Team Day and Team Night were competing to see who could raise the most money.  There were four rounds in which a singer from each team presented an aria, song or MT number.  The one with the most pledges got to sing his or her “show off” aria.  For an additional donation, the loser got to do the same.  Given that some of the city’s best young singers were performing it was to be expected that it was a good show.

Continue reading →

Autocorrect Opera

Posted on by
8

trioLoose TEA Theatre’s new show Autocorrect Opera opened last night on the steamy outdoor patio of Atelier Rosemarie Umetsu.  It’s a double bill of one acters adapted for the age of the smartphone and the text message.  The first piece; Sravinsky’s Mavra was played fairly straight.  The young girl Parasha does open the piece with a lament about her boyfriend not texting her and the final denouement is brought on by a missed text but otherwise the plot isn’t much altered though we get a neat updating to the home of a contemporary, status conscious bourgeois with references to the price of Ferrari tyres etc.  Good performances all round with Morgan Strickland as a well sung, angsty Parasha, Greg Finney, with his characteristic power and comic timing, as the rich and rather obnoxious father.  Keenan Viau, coming in at short notice for an indisposed Daniel Wheeler, was the convincingly annoying neighbour and Justin Stolz was excellent as the extremely unconvincing cross dressing pizza boy, boyfriend, maid.  So, good fun but maybe not taking the theme of the evening as far as it might have gone.

Continue reading →

Opera on wheels

Posted on by
Reply

curtainYesterday saw the 21st and final performance for this season for the Bicycle Opera Project; the conclusion of a five week, fourteen city trip around Ontario.  Fittingly for an eco-opera venture it took place at the Evergreen Brickworks in a bare brick and sheet metal industrial setting.The programme consisted of seven pieces; short works or excerpts from longer ones, all by contemporary Canadian composers and scored or rescored by them for the unusual ensemble of keyboards, flute and clarinet that accompanied the singers.

First up was an excerpt from Brian Current’s Airline Icarus. They played the scene where the passengers and stewardess are expressing their hopes and, more vehemently, fears.  It’s an uncomfortably funny scene and it was played here in a more broadly comedic manner than in Tim Albery’s original staging.  That proved very effective as a stand alone especially with most of the audience up so close.  Fine performances from all four singers with Chris Enns as an extremely angsty academic, Stephanie Tritchew flirtatiously displaying her considerable charms and some neat eye rolling from Larissa Koniuk and all anchored by Geoffrey Sirett reprising the role of the Businessman.  I was reminded too what a fine score this is, even in the reduced arrangement used here. Continue reading →

From Severn to Somme

Posted on by
3

maltmanLast night at Walter Hall, as part of the Toronto Summer Music Festival,  Chris Maltman and Graham Johnson gave a recital that explored the experience of war through song.  It was a long and varied programme with twenty two songs in four languages commemorating most of the great empires that went to war in 1914 though many of the songs were from earlier periods.  At the core of the programme were early 20th century settings of English pastoral poems.  Butterworth’s settings of Houseman were there but, sneakily, we got Somervell’s much less well known setting of Think no more lad.  In a similar vein there were Gurney and Finzi.  The Americas were represented in a characteristically rambunctious Ives setting of a horribly jingoistic McCrae poem; He is there. McCrae may be the only well known war poet who managed to survive until 1918 without developing any sense of irony.  Beyond the English speaking world there were songs by Mussorgsky, Mahler, Fauré, Schumann, Wolf and Poulenc.

Continue reading →

LibLab reading

Posted on by
Reply

A few weeks ago I wrote about the Tapestry LibLab; a structured creative collaboration between composers and librettists.  Yesterday we got a preview of the results.  Twelve works created in this year’s programme were given a run through by the previously announced performers plus singer/dance Eva Tavares.  The works will form the basis of this year’s Tapestry Briefs show in November when they will be fully staged.

Continue reading →

When the Sun Comes Out

Posted on by
Reply

tkIt’s World Pride Week in Toronto and as far as I know Tamar Iveri isn’t in town.  What is, is the Toronto premier of When the Sun Comes Out by Leslie Uyeda and Rachel Rose presented by Queer Innovative Theatre; a group of LGBTTIQQ2SA (WTF BBQ!) performers.  Unsurprisingly the piece treats of same sex relationships.  It’s a love triangle with a twist.  Solana (Teiya Kasahara) is a foot loose wandering lesbian who has fallen in love with a married woman, Lilah (Stephanie Yelovich) who, unfortunately, lives in a dystopia where same sex relationships are a capital offence.  Their relationship, and their lives, are threatened by Lilah’s jealous husband Javan (Keith Lam).  But he too has a secret in his past.  They also have a daughter who neither will give up making simple resolution of the relationship issues impossible.

Continue reading →

Pelléas et Mélisande in the Tanenbaum Courtyard Garden

Posted on by
2

Hidden away up an alleyway behind the COC’s ioffice and rehearsal complex is a very beautiful garden.  I say hidden because I lived less than 200m away for 10 years before I discovered it.  Last night it made a rather magical setting for Against the Grain Theatre’s new production of Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande.  The piece is set in a gloomy castle and surrounding forest in Brittany.  The high, ivy covered walls and ironwork of the performance space, enhanced by Camelia Koo’s fractured flagstones forming patterns on the grass, evoked the essentially sunless world of Maeterlinck’s poem.  Costuming in the style of the period’s composition meshed nicely with the aesthetic of the roughly contemporary space.

blockd-3031 Continue reading →

Shelter

Posted on by
1

Shelter; music by Juliet Palmer, libretto by Julie Salverson, has been ten years in the making.  It premiered in Edmonton a couple of years ago, finally, got its Toronto premiere at the Berkeley Street Theatre  last night under the auspices of Tapestry.  It’s a complex and eclectic piece dealing with what it is to be human in a nuclear age.  There are two parallel plots which intersect in a way that makes dramatic sense but violate conventional notions of synchronicity.  This is, after all, a piece rooted in post Einsteinian physics.  The first concerns Austrian Jewish physicist Lise Meintner, one of the discoverers of nuclear fission.  She has been forced into exile by the Anschluss and is seen here refusing to work on the Manhattan project.  The second plot concerns a highly stereotypical 1950s American couple Thomas and Claire who meet at a social, marry and quickly produce a child; Hope.  Their “American Dream” is shattered when it turns out that the baby glows!  Fast forward 21 years and Hope is demanding her freedom in a world from which she has thus far been sheltered.  Reenter Meintner, engaged by Thomas to be Hope’s tutor, and still obsessing about the Manhattan project.  The final twist comes with the arrival of the Pilot, in WW2 Army Air Corps uniform, who uses a Geiger counter to find his prey.  He fails to convince Meintner to change her mind but does persuade Hope to fulfill her destiny as He pilots the Enola Gay to 31,000 feet and a clear sky.  It’s weird, disturbing and powerful.

Shelter-KZ5 Continue reading →