On Tuesday night Theatre Passe Muraille hosted the first of two “music and food” shows curated by members of the Women in Musical Leadership programme under the auspices of Tapestry Opera. Juliane Gallant trawled her Acadian roots to create Le Kitchen Party.fun.
Herbert Fritsch’s production of Rossini’s Il barbiere di Sivigla filmed at the Wiener Staatsoper in 2021 is strangely ambiguous. At first blush it looks like the sort of hyper traditional production the WSO might have had in repertory for fifty years. There are big wigs, knee breeches and so on but it soon becomes apparent that something more (or less) is going on. Tje costumes are exaggerated. The fabrics are elaborate and shiny and very not early 19th century at all. The wigs are odd colours. Rosina’s dress shows rather a lot of leg. There’s virtually no scenery and the only props I recall in the whole piece are a ladder and Lindoro’s sword at the end of Act 1.
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.
operaramblings 