Mark Leiren-Young’s Playing Shylock opened at Canadian Stage on Wednesday night. It’s a one man show featuring Canadian stage, film and TV icon Saul Rubinek and directed by the equally venerable Martin Kinch. And it’s back where it all started for both of them in what was then Toronto Free Theatre on Berkeley Street (once, appropriately enough, a gas works).
Verdi’s Ernani is set in the reign of Charles V of Spain just before he becomes Holy Roman Emperor (1519), not that there’s anything remotely historical about the plot which is classic love and revenge stuff. The reason I mention it is because I’m trying to understand what director Lotte de Beer is driving at in the production staged and filmed at Bregenz in 2023.
My review of Opera Atelier’s production of Handel’s Acis and Galatea is now up at Opera Canada.
Photo: Bruce Zinger
Quebec based Les Violons du Roy performed on Sunday at Koerner Hall with soprano Karina Gauvin and contralto Marie-Nicole Lemieux. The music was all drawn from Handel’s English language oratorios and featured orchestral pieces and a number of arias and duets. These works are some of my favourites so I was a bit surprised that I didn’t enjoy the concert as much as I expected.
Productions on the lake stage at Bregenz are usually spectacular but rarely stray very far from the traditional/canonical. The production of Weber’s Der Freischütz, directed by Philipp Stölzl and recorded in 2023 is quite radical though. I think there are three main elements to this quite ambitious reworking. One is to give Samiel a much enhanced role. Here he is both MC and puppetmaster; controlling the action, including playing with time, and addressing the audience directly. The second element is to emphasize that this is taking place in the aftermath of the Thirty Year War and, to add to the misery of that, the village has suffered severe flooding. This sets up a duality between Agathe as the one who still, despite everything, trusts in God and Ännchen who believes God has forsaken them. This tension serves to make the two girls perhaps the most important figures, after Samiel, in the piece.
November is looking busy and interesting in both the theatre and the concert hall. Here are some shows you might be interested in…
Sankofa: The Soldier’s Tale Retold is the latest and, probably, the last show from Art of Time Ensemble. It’s a bold and successful attempt at updating Stravinsky’s iconic work. The music is all Stravinsky but Titilope Sonuga’s libretto is new. It preserves the basic triad of Narrator, Soldier and the Devil but moves them to WW1 Canada. Our soldier is a Black Canadian of West African extraction who is trying to join the Canadian army, which rejects him because of his skin colour. His faith in his heritage, symbolised by the spirit bird Sankofa, with a little help from the Devil leads to the formation of the 2nd Construction Battalion, a non-combat unit, which was the only way Black Canadians could serve. He survives the war and returns from France to find that the same battles must be fought over (and over, and over) again.
I saw My Name is Lucy Barton; adapted for the stage by Rona Munro from Elizabeth Strout’s novel and directed by Jackie Maxwell on Wednesday evening. It’s a one woman show featuring an astonishing performance by Maev Beaty who is on stage for the entire play, which is little short of two hours long. She plays Lucy Barton and her mother and all the other characters are described not shown. In some ways it feels more like a book reading than a stage play.
Butterfly Lightning Shakes the Earth is a new miniature album of her own compositions by cellist India Gailey. Back in the day we would probably have called this an EP as there is about 20 minutes of music in all.
The first piece; Mountainweeps, consists of three sixty second pieces for solo cello. This was written for Arlen Hlusko for Instagram performance when that platform limited videos to sixty seconds! It’s a sort of meditation on the impact of climate change on alpine environments. It’s quite complex for such a short piece and quite beguiling. Continue reading
Bonnie Duff’s This Feels Like the End premiered at Buddies in Bad Times on Thursday evening, directed by Michelle Blight, as part of Next Stage. I caught the second performance on Saturday afternoon. The premise is that the sun has failed to rise so the entire world is deprived of natural light and nobody can explain it. It’s even more inexplicable in that there isn’t a drastic drop in temperature, plants still grow and the moon is visible but let’s not get hung up on the physics. The play is about the different ways humans react to such a phenomenon.
operaramblings 