Trident Moon, by Anusree Roy and directed by Nina Lee Aquino opened at Crow’s Theatre on Friday night. It’s set in 1947 during the Partition of India and concerns a bunch of women in the back of a truck seeking safety in what has become India. Arun is a Hindu servant to a Moslem family. Her boss, presumably to show he is not soft on Hindus, has beheaded her husband and sons. In revenge she has shot him and kidnapped three of his women folk in the hope that they can be multiply raped by Hindu men when they reach “safety”. The truck also contains her sister who has been accidentally, but seriously, wounded in the shooting, her retarded daughter and a box with the three heads. The truck is driven by her brother.
(L to R back) Afroza Banu, Michelle Mohammed, Anusree Roy, Prerna Nehta, Zorana Sadiq, and Imali Prerera. (Front) Sahiba Arora and Sehar Bhojani
This year’s West End Micro Music Festival opened on Friday night at Redeemer Lutheran with a programme titled Ecstatic Voices. It was a mix of works for eight part a cappella vocal ensemble and a couple of solo tuned percussion pieces.
So it looks like January is finally over and that means we can look ahead to next month. Things are definitely winding down. There’s the last Opera Pub of the season on the 3rd at the Amsterdam Bicycle Club. The Vancouver Symphony is appearing with Bramwell Tovey at Roy Thomson Hall on the 26th with the highlight being Marion Newman singing Ancestral Voices; a piece Tovey wrote for her. Also that evening the Canadian Children’s Opera opens a two performance run of Alice Ping Yee Ho’s new piece The Monkiest King. That’s at the Toronto Centre for the Arts.
The COC has announced four additions to the COC Ensemble Studio for 2018/19. I don’t think there any surprises. The three prize winners from last season’s Centre Stage are joined by Lauren Margison, daughter of Richard and currently with the Atelier Lyrique in Montreal. Just for fun I researched how long the four had been on the OR radar. The most recent is Montreal based soprano Anna-Sophie Neher who was unknown to me until Centre Stage. Next would be mezzo Simona Genga; UoT graduate and top prize winner at Centre Stage. She first appeared in these pages in a review of a 
operaramblings 