Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’ The Comeuppance is playing at Soulpepper in a production directed by Frank Cox-O’Connell. It’s an enormously ambitious play. It takes the relatively banal setting of a pre-party for a high school 20th reunion and uses it to explore a wide range of issues concerning memory, personal growth (or not), what we keep and what we leave behind and, ultimately, our relationship with Death.
As written, Hans Abrahamsen’s The Snow Queen is a fairly dark piece that cleaves pretty closely to the original Hans Christian Andersen story. The production at the Bayerische Staatsoper (in an English version adapted by Amanda Holden from the original Danish) and recorded in Munich in 2019 takes it to a new level of complexity and darkness. Director Andreas Kriegenburg has added additional avatars of the children Gerda and Kay to the scene creating three Gerda/Kay pairings. There are the children as children played by actors. There’s an adolescent pair played by mezzo-soprano Rachael Wilson as Kay and an actor, Anna Ressel, as adolescent Gerda and a forty-something couple played by soprano Barbara Hannigan as Gerda and actor Thomas Graßle as Kay.
operaramblings 