Dragon’s Tale; music by Chan Ka Nin, text by Mark Brownell, premiered at Harbourfront last night. It’s a rather clever mash up of two stories which, taken together, address how we face the future without abandoning the past or, alternatively, getting stuck in it. The first story concerns a young Chinese Canadian woman in Toronto, Xiao Lian, whose widowed father is dying. She is torn between her desire to “get a life” and his obsessive insistence that the “old ways”, meaning essentially here looking after him, come first.
So what’s coming up in July? Let’s look first at a few late June shows I haven’t mentioned before.
It’s a bit of a thing with me. I tend to prefer staged versions of the Handel English language oratorios to the Italian operas. I know it’s a view I share with quite a few singers, including Ryan McDonald and Anna Sharpe with whom I was chatting about it on the weekend. But, it would seem, this opinion is not shared by opera house managements (not to be confused with audiences!). 
operaramblings 