This year’s Canadian Children’s Opera Company main show is a new production of Alice Ho and Marjorie Chan’s The Monkiest King which the company previously performed in 2018. This time it was at Harbourfront Centre Theatre which offered some additional opportunities and some challenges with its multi level configuration but also some sight line issues.
Diana Tso’s Carried by the River is currently playing in the Extraspace at Tarragon Theatre in a production directed by William Yong for the Red Snow Collective. It’s the story of a Chinese girl, Kai, who is abandoned by her birth mother because of the “one child policy”, adopted by a Hong Kong mother and brought to Canada as a baby. When she’s about twenty her mother dies unexpectedly leaving her with many unanswered questions. She travels to the province of her birth in search of.. do we ever know what we “are in search of”?
The Monkey Queen, currently being presented by Red Snow Collective at the Theatre Centre Incubator, is a play with music and movement, rather than opera or music theatre. Diana Tso’s play riffs off the classic Journey to the West to create a “journey to the east” in which a Chinese-Canadian woman explores her own roots and identity in a narrative and landscape half real, half mythical.
Over 200,000 women from across Asia were conscripted into sexual slavery by the Japanese army in WW2. They were euphemistically described as “comfort women”. In 2009 playwright Diana Tso met some of the survivors, heard their stories and wrote a play based on their testimony. The result was Comfort, currently playing at the Aki Studio in a production directed by William Yong with music by Constantin Caravassilis.
operaramblings 