Chelsea Woodley’s Enormity, Girl and the Earthquake in Her Lungs, in a production directed by Andrea Donaldson for Nightwood Theatre, opened at the Jackman Performance Centre on Saturday night. It’s enormously ambitious and performed with great skill and energy but I’m not sure it entirely works.
I’ve been listening to Emily D’Angelo’s debut album elageia (find out more in the next edition of Opera Canada). It features music by Missy Mazzoli, with whom I’m a bit familiar, and by Sarah Kirkland Snider and Hildur Gudnadóttir, who are both new to me. Like Mazzoli, Snider is an exponent of that kind of cross-genre vocal music that seems to be assuming some significance in the US music scene. I’ve been listening to her song cycle Penelope which riffs off Homer’s Odyssey from a woman’s POV. Specifically the texts, by playwright Ellen McLaughlin, tell the story of a woman re-engaging with the man she was married to who has gone missing missing for 20 years and returned with PTSD.
The Perfect American is the ironic title of Philip Glass’ latest opera which premiered in Madrid last year. It’s about Walt Disney and set at the end of his life looking back at his life and forward to his death. It’s a not very flattering portrait. It depicts Disney as blinkered, racist, virulently anti-Communist and, in fact, only comfortable with a sort of Leave it to Beaver America; though passionate about that.
operaramblings 