Unsuk Chin’s Alice in Wonderland premiered at the BayerischeStaatsoper in 2007 in a production by Achim Freyer. It’s a curious work. It cleaves fairly closely to Carroll but the beginning and ending are altered to make it clear this is all a dream. In between those two short scenes we get all the familiar stuff; Cheshire Cat, Caterpillar, Tea Party, Croquet Lawn, Trial etc. It’s all staged on a steeply raked stage with a sort of set of “advent calendar” openings. Lines of light are used to suggest scale changes and the characters (almost) all wear mesh masks and have puppet selves too. It’s a look that won costume designer Nina Weitzner an award. Everybody seems to be wearing an aerial wire and there’s a fair bit of flying about. It looks, on the face of it, visually inventive and psychologically convincing.
Things are really starting to slow down so this will be the last “upcoming” post before the summer lull when this feature will go on hiatus. Next week there’s the final vocal concert of the season in the RBA. It’s on Tuesday at noon when Karine Boucher will perform Ravel’s Shéhérazade with Charles Sy joining in with Britten’s Les Illuminations. On Sunday 21st at 5pm in Mazzoleni Hall, Christina Campsall has a recital of 20th century works including the challenging Messiaen piece, Poèmes pour Mi. It’s free.
Now that Against the Grain are in the process of completing their da Ponte trio with A Little Too Cozy enquiring minds want to know where the genre of site specific updating goes next. And who better to do this than the formidable combined artistic brain power of my loyal readers (even the Bolshie ones). Your challenge, should you choose to accept it, is to outline (in the Comments) a possible scenario for a site specific updating of a canonical opera. Here’s mine: 
I met with Aria Umezawa yesterday to talk about Opera 5’s latest project, a rather unusual take on Johann Strauss’ Die Fledermaus. The project grew out of a desire to break Opera 5’s association with reviving rather obscure pieces and to do something “from the canon”. But, of course, for this company there had to be an angle. In this case it’s that Act 2 will be an immersive, audience participation exercise. We are all invited to Orlofsky’s party. There will be aerialists, burlesque dancers and a grand waltz for all which will probably reduce choreographer Jenn Nichols to tears. There a few other change ups. Frosh is gone and Ivan is replaced by drag queen Pearl Harbor, who will emcee the party. It’s in English, as the set up would make surtitles pretty much impossible. And the cast is pretty good. Michael Barrett sings Eisenstein with Rachel Krehm as Rosalinde, Julie Ludwig as Adele and Erin Lawson as Orlofsky among others.
operaramblings 