Toronto Operetta Company’s season opened with a run of a “modified” version of Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Mikado. It had the by now traditional updates predictably featuring numerous references to Mango Mussolini and the odd dig at Metrolinx but the bigger change, and a sensible one I think, was to peel away the the fake japonerie that must have seemed a bit lame in 1885 and is as intolerable as a “traditional” Madama Butterfly today.
Toronto Operetta Theatre opened the concluding show of their 2024/25 season at the Jane Mallett Theatre on Friday evening. It’s Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Gondoliers directed and choreographed by Guillermo Silva-Marin. It’s pretty decent and, besides, TOT is about the only chance to see G&S in Toronto; whatever one thinks of their approach. For those who have seen TOT’s G&S before it’s fair to say this is a very typical TOT G&S production.
Toronto Operetta Theatre opened a production of Frank Lehár’s A Merry Widow at the Jane Mallet Theatre last night. It’s in some ways very much the TOT package one expects; English translation with a few gently updated jokes, a small pit orchestra, lots of movement and a cast of young, up and coming singers (for the most part). There were no real surprises. It was just done rather well.
The second Ruckus at the Revival from Opera Revue was subtitled “The Parody Edition” and with the odd exception that’s what it was.; Music by Mozart, Sullivan, Delibes and more supported witty lyrics about Opera Revue’s perennial bêtes noires. Doug Ford (and all his little Satanic demons), the TTC, the housing crisis, Toronto drivers and the rest got exactly what they deserved to the audience’s approval and delight. Most of the words and a good deal of the singing here from Opera Revue stalwarts Danie Friesen and Alex Hajek.
Toronto Operetta Theatre opened a run of Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Pirates of Penzance at the Jane Mallett Theatre last night.I think it’s got everything one could expect from a modest budget G&S production and maybe a bit more. Bill Silva-Marin’s production is energetic with a lot of stomping, marching and mincing going on which makes the small stage (even smaller than usual as the band is on stage) look lively and busy. The chorus is good and sings idiomatically. The principals also appear to understand the genre and there’s some good acting and good, at times excellent, singing.
Toronto Operetta Theatre opened a run of Johann Strauss’ Die Fledermaus at the St. Lawrence Centre yesterday. It’s a revival of their 2018 production and I don’t think my opinion of the production has really changed. The jokes have been updated a bit; mostly to reflect the anticipated imprisonment of a certain former US president (I wish!). But basically the schtick is the same.
Toronto Operetta Theatre opened a run of Offenbach’s Orpheus in the Underworld at the St. Lawrence Centre last night. Guillermo Silva-Marin gives it a pretty conventional treatment with minimal scenery, “Greek” costumes and no big surprises. It’s sung in English which has pros and cons for while the dialogue is intelligible enough the comprehensibility of the sung part is a bit variable.
Oscar Straus’ A Waltz Dream opened last night in a Toronto Operetta theatre production at the St. Lawrence Centre. The piece premiered in Vienna in 1907 and soon became a huge international hit with various English versions appearing quite early on. The version given by TOT appears to be a 1970s version with book by Michael Flanders, Edmund Tracey and Bernard Dunn and the music adapted and arranged by Ronald Hanmer.
A Northern Lights Dream is a new operetta by Michael Rose which premiered this last week at Toronto Operetta Theatre in a production directed by Guillermo Silva-Marin. A new operetta is a very rare thing. It;’s just not a form that contemporary composers seem to take to. There’s far too much spoken dialogue for an opera but the musical language; mostly tonal, often quite beautiful but not afraid to get more abrasive when appropriate, is much closer to that of contemporary opera than musical theatre. So an operetta it is.
Toronto Operetta Theatre’s latest offering is a webstream of Emmerich Kálmán’s 1915 operetta The Csárdás Princess (Die Csárdásfürstin) presented here in English with the usual minor tweaks to the dialogue including obligatory Rob Ford jokes, which have become something of a TOT tradition. The plot turns on the fact that an Austro-Hungarian aristo, let alone a second cousin of the Emperor, can’t marry someone with fewer than 64 quarterings on their coat of arms, let alone a cabaret singer. Implausible impersonations etc abound and love triumphs in the end. It’s all entirely harmless for heaven forfend that anything satirical might have made it past the Vienna censorship, especially in wartime. And there’s no sex because this isn’t France. The humour mostly turns on Hungarian antipathy for their Austrian masters. It’s light hearted and very tuneful fun.
operaramblings 