Angel’s Bone

Angel’s Bone; music by Du Yun, libretto by Royce Vavrek, is an interesting concept.  It deals with human trafficking through the medium of two angels who fall to earth and find themselves in the hands of a couple; one of them a formerly trafficked person, who exploit them for sexual/commercial purposes.  It’s dramatically quite effective, well constructed and the libretto has a certain poetry to it.  It played at Harbourfront Theatre this last weekend in a co-pro by Sound the Alarm Music Theatre, Loose Tea Music Theatre and Array Music.

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Dragon’s Tale

Dragon’s Tale; music by Chan Ka Nin, text by Mark Brownell,  premiered at Harbourfront last night.  It’s a rather clever mash up of two stories which, taken together, address how we face the future without abandoning the past or, alternatively, getting stuck in it.  The first story concerns a young Chinese Canadian woman in Toronto, Xiao Lian, whose widowed father is dying.  She is torn between her desire to “get a life” and his obsessive insistence that the “old ways”, meaning essentially here looking after him, come first.

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