UoT Opera’s spring production; Massenet’s 1899 opera Cendrillon, has been transferred to the Elgin Theatre with the MacMillan currently out of commission. They have made some sensible accommodations to the rather unfriendly Elgin acoustic. The orchestra is reduced to about thirty players and placed at floor level in front of the stage. Almost all the stage action takes place right at the front which helped significantly with voice projection.
Pandolfe & Servants
First some additional February shows
Opera
Lysistrata Reimagined is this year’s UoT Opera Student Composer Collective production. It’s a setting of a libretto by Michael Patrick Albano loosely inspired by Aristophanes’ Lysistrata. In fact about all of Lysistrata that remains is that it’s in Greece, there’s a sex strike to stop a war and a couple of character names are retained. But then, as the first scene tells us, nobody reads that stuff, or remembers it, anymore.
So, we are in a city. The men, up to now gainfully employed making triangular wheels, writing romance novels or teaching interpretative dance decide that “war” is a good thing and they want one. Lysistrata who is, apparently, the leader of the local womenfolk isn’t so keen and persuades the ladies to withdraw their favours until the men drop the war idea. One woman, though, Lampito (inevitably), rather likes the war idea and kits herself out for it but doesn’t really convince anyone else. With deadlock reached after three weeks Lysistrata calls on the local (female) sage for help but all she gets are “a string of proverbs and useless clichés”. But then a miracle happens. Overnight some people change gender and some realise it’s just a social construct. So now there’s nothing particularly masculine about war which persuades the boys (or whatever they are now) to drop the idea and normal relations are resumed though one suspects in greater variety.
Il cappello di paglia di Firenze is a farce by Nino Rota, probably better known as a composer of film music particularly associated with Fellini. It’s playing right now at UoT Opera in a production directed by Jennifer Tarver. It’s an ambitious show. There’s a clever two level set, designed by Michelle Tracey,; indoors on an upper level and outdoors at stage level, and clearly a lot of thought and work has gone into both sets and costumes. The direction and choreography (Anna Theodosakis) is involved and makes use of the full space of the MacMillan Theatre with comings and goings all over the place energetically executed by quite a large cast. Continue reading
Here’s what I’m looking forward to in a busy November.
UoT Opera presented a show of mostly Mozart arias/scenes in a semi staged fashion directed by Mabel Wonnacott in the RBA on Wednesday. Although each scene was credited in the programme the parts weren’t specified and since I don’t know this new group of students I’m only gong to name names where I’m sure!
The new season starts to ramp up in September. My month will start at Factory Theatre on the 7th with Mary Beath Badian’s The Waltz; a coming of age drama set in Saskatchewan. That runs until the 17th. The following night there’s a screening at the Four Seasons Centre of Atom Egoyan’s new film Seven Veils that was created in conjunction with last season’s production of Salome. A young woman is tasked with remounting her former mentor’s production of Salome. It stars Amanda Seyfried, Ambur Braid, Michael Schade and Michael Kupfer-Radecky. It’s a chance to see the film ahead of the official premier at TIFF. More details and tickets here.
June is fast approaching and, as ever, it’s one of the odder months in the performance calendar. Here’s what has caught my eye (so far).
Yesterday there was an early evening performance in Walter Hall by members of the UoT Opera. Fourteen singers and two pianists in various combinations presented a total of eleven scenes. The scenes were blocked with some basic props but concert dress, or rather whatever part of the singer’s wardrobe evoked their character for them, which is probably more fun if you are singing Musetta than Dr. Bartolo.
UoT Opera Division’s production of Arthur Benjamin’s A Tale of Two Cities, currently playing at the MacMillan Theatre, is really rather good. Its partly the work itself which surely deserves to be better known. It’s a 1950 work to a libretto by Cedric Cliffe. It was written for the Festival of Britain and was considered a success at the time. It is in many ways typical of mid 20th century English opera (though Benjamin was a peripatetic Australian rather than a Brit). It’s colourful and uses a large orchestra with lots of brass and percussion and combines lyricism with some fairly heavy dissonance. It also includes a few good arias, notably one for Lucie Manette, the romantic female interest.
Dr. Manette (Burak Yaman), Lucie Manette (Emily Rocha)
operaramblings 