The Abominable Showman; Baritone Étienne Dupuis

The triumphant homecoming of Etienne Dupuis

After receiving accolades across Europe, Montreal baritone Etienne Dupuis returns home to star in The Barber of Seville at L’Opéra de Montréal 

by Richard Burnett 

@bugsburnett

(Rehearsal photos by Yves Renaud)

Montrealers remember seeing rising baritone Etienne Dupuis when he was part of a flash mob of opera singers staged in the busy Marché Jean Talon market in his hometown of Montreal, to promote L’Opéra de Montréal in 2010. “I love people’s faces when I start singing opera in an up-close space,” Dupuis told the Vancouver Straight alt-weekly. “We were standing right in front of them and they just became statues. People don’t realize the nature of that sound and what it does to you. It can make you vibrate.”

Watch the clip here.

First-Person: Baritone Étienne Dupuis inside Against the Grain's Pélleas et Mélisande

On the Joys of a Broken Foot
by Étienne Dupuis
@EtienneLovesYa

I met Miriam Khalil a few years back, when we were singing together in a production of La Bohème as Marcello and Musetta.  She told me about her husband Joel Ivany and Against the Grain Theatre, and that they were doing a production of La Bohème…in a bar!  I loved the idea!  Still do!  I love even more the idea of going 'against the grain' with opera. Opera nowadays is bound by traditions so tightly that it's getting harder and harder to remove the dust and the rust clinging to it. The only problem is,  AtG was doing this Bohème in English, using Joel's own translation. I sing the role of Marcello in Italian all the time, and learning it in English would have been too risky...so I turned the role down.