The Canadian Children’s Opera Company is reviving Dean Burry’s adaptation of JRR Tolkien’s The Hobbit on its twentieth anniversary.  The first performance was on Friday evening at the Harbourfront Centre Theatre.  It’s really quite an achievement to condense a 320pp novel into an 80 minute opera respecting the constraints of writing mostly for young voices.  It’s clever.  It’s structured as twelve discrete scenes and most of the singing is choral.  Groups of performers; essentially sorted by age cohort, represent the various “tribes” of Middle Earth; hobbits, humans, elves, dwarves etc.  There are a limited number of solo roles and dialogue is used rather than recitative so exposed solo singing is kept to a minimum.  This all provides meaningful roles for lots of performers without creating “impossible to cast” ones.

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