Review: (Toronto / Opera) Madama Butterfly

l-r Patricia Racette, Ella Larivière, Elizabeth DeShong  (photo by Michael Cooper)

Straight to Hell
by Shannon Christy, Senior Contributor

Have you ever been used?  Perhaps you are a trusting person who took someone at their word and paid the price.  Maybe at this very moment you are alone in your apartment taking care of some plants you don’t even like for fear that they may die while their chief caregiver and your wife/husband/partner is away. Then maybe they don’t return. Well if you have been in that position Madama Butterfly is for you.  If you have not been in that position then Madama Butterfly serves as an excellent reason why you never want to be.

Review: (Toronto / Opera) Falstaff

l-r  Russell Braun, Gerald Finley (photo by Michael Cooper)

You Ain’t Nothing But A Hound Dog
by Shannon Christy, Senior Contributor

According to Webster’s Dictionary an “appetizer is a small dish of food meant to stimulate your appetite”. If Falstaff is the appetizer then Toronto is in for a spectacular season at the Canadian Opera Company. Falstaff, Verdi’s last masterpiece, is a light show done with ribald humour, superb performances and amazing sets.

Review: (Toronto / Opera) Don Quichotte

Just My Imagination
by Shannon Christy

Every country has its myths.  The United States believes they are a beacon for freedom and democracy. Canada believes that it is a nice country. The French believe that people are inherently rational. Hence it is of little surprise that after having survived a crushing defeat to Prussia because of the irrational aspirations of Napoleon III, the brilliant French opera composer Jules Massenet turned Don Quichotte into an opera. Both he and Miguel Cervantes had seen their ideals bashed against reality and both looked to the errant knight and his island of dreams as a refuge and an excuse to continue. The Seattle production of Don Quichotte presented by the COC provides the music, stunning performers, and a reproduction of the original but it fails to provide the imagination to connect our flawed world to the flawed world of a France eclipsed by the pragmatic Prussians of the 19th century or a Spain of the 16th century lost to the Inquisition and awash in gold and corruption.  That is unfortunate because if there ever was a time when the island of dreams would be a pleasant respite from a cold reality that time is now.

Review: (Toronto / Opera) Persée

Don’t Stop Believing 
by Shannon Christy

People give strange wedding gifts. Imagine for a moment that you have just been married to a stunning woman who hails from a remarkable family, is intelligent and incredibly witty.  On your wedding night you are presented with a gift: an opera about a bastard who is infatuated with a beautiful maiden engaged to someone else. The bastard then rescues her from many monsters one of whom is her betrothed. One would have to be sympathetic if Louis XVI was upset about such a wedding gift but if the original was anywhere near as entertaining as what Opera Atelier presented last night then it is understandable if the Dauphin and future King of France simply ignored the content preferring to indulge in the music, ribald humour, and beauty presented to him.

The story is about the exploits of Persée, (Christopher Enns) who is the self-proclaimed bastard of Jupiter and is in love with Andromède, (Mireille Asselin), despite the fact that she is a class above him and already betrothed to Phinée, (Vasil Garvanliev). Naturally Persée is oblivious to this and as a result a series of events unfold putting our hero on the path of capturing the eye of his desire. 

Review: (Toronto / Opera) Roberto Devereux

(photo by Michael Cooper)

Caught in a trap
by Shannon Christy

"Hell has no fury like a woman scorned” - Virgil may have had his own twisted purposes for writing of Dido’s rage against Aeneas in the Aeneid but the idea certainly resonates with the hapless Roberto Devereux, played sublimely by Leonardo Capalbo, who is sacrificed simply because he doesn’t love the right women. Never mind that the right woman is the Queen of England and that the woman he does love is married, the basic primus of not scorning a woman remains. 

The story is set at the end of the Elizabethan age and involves Roberto Devereux, a cocky youth’s trial for treason by men who are simply jealous.  His guilt or innocence is never actually tried on stage: the central question is does Roberto love Queen Elizabeth I and the answer is a resounding no. 

This is an interesting piece because it plays with the image of the Virgin Queen Elizabeth, performed magnificently by Sondra Radvanovsky, and the influence of both her parents in forming her.  For instance, on one side you have a woman who has her passions and truly cares and wants to be cared for which are traits historians used to describe her mother Anne Boleyn but on the other hand you have a woman who has successfully put a number of men she was rumoured to have had affairs with to death for treason, a trait she shared with her father who is infamous for radically getting rid of wives who failed to produce male heirs. 

Review: (Toronto / Opera) Hercules

Richard Croft, Lucy Crowe (Photo: Michael Cooper)

Suspicious Minds
by Shannon Christy

"When there is peace, the warlike man attacks himself."  
Frederick Nietzsche  

Peter Sellars has taken this idea and set it in the present day United States to present us with George Frederic Handel’s Hercules. Mr. Sellars is exposing a nerve regarding America’s troubled veterans which is made the more poignant because of another tragic shooting in Fort Hood, Texas where three soldiers were killed by a veteran suffering from post traumatic stress disorder this past week.

The story revolves around Hercules’, (Eric Owens), triumphant return to his wife Dejanira, (Alice Coote) with a captive princess Iole, (Lucy Crowe).  In most productions this is a simple love triangle.  However, Mr Sellars has deliberately twisted and transformed this love triangle and provided us with a fourth menacing element, the war, as an explanation of what is tearing apart this fearsome man, his loving wife, and the beautiful captive. 

Review: (Toronto) Così Fan Tutte

Tracy Dahl, Sir Thomas Allen (Photo: Michael Cooper)

Double Trouble
by Shannon Christy
Twitter User ID: schristy79

Mozart must have been hard to hang out with.  On one hand you have a musical genius and on the other you have a guy, who by modern standards would have had a fraternity sense of humour.  Still beyond his shenanigans and through his lighter works emerges a dark image of humanity where the illusion of individuality gives way to uniformity of human behaviour where all individuals are beholden to their base instincts.  This piece contains all of the above.

In Così Fan Tutte this notion emerges through the relationship of two couples Ferrando (Paul Appleby) and Dorabella (Wallis Giunta), and Guglielmo (Robert Gleadow) and Fiordiligi (Layla Claire).  Ferrando and Guglielmo challenge an indecent proposal from their friend Don Alfonso (Sir Thomas Allen) that all women are incapable of being faithful despite their oaths of allegiance and that given enough time and pressure all will submit to seduction.

Director Atom Egoyan has taken a slight spin away from the original fatalism versus individual freedom interpretation of Cosi Fan Tutte (everyone does things that way regardless of their will), and substitutes it for a more sexual liberating one where everybody is doing it (Mozart would have been proud).  To do this he has set our protagonists in a school dedicated to the art of seduction and transformed Don Alfonso from a philosopher to a professor.  In addition, Mr. Egoyan provides a motif of several different butterflies pinned and preserved and the image of Frida Kahlo’s Two Frida’s to illustrate that love is an ephemeral emotion that can cut the heart with surgical precision.  It is a very impressive imagery that sears into your consciousness.

Review: (Toronto) le fa le do

(photo by Marc Lemyre)

Weird Science
by Shannon Christy

The notion of eternal youth must have intrigued man from the moment we crawled out of our primordial goo and set foot/fin on the surface and looked down to see in a reflection that we had some lines. The quest for eternal youth has been something civilization has been searching since the Pyramids to the modern notion of the Singularity. Le fa le do is the Théâtre français de Toronto’s attempt to throw their hat in the ring to come up with an entertaining if improbable answer to this age-old mystery. 

Review: (Toronto) Abduction From the Seraglio

Ambur Braid, Lawrence Wilfiord (photo by Bruce Zinger)

I Need a Hero
by Shannon Christy

At some point one wonders why the cavemen bothered to paint on their walls.  Theories abound but I have always been convinced that it was boredom.  Art to a large sense is a desire to alleviate the pain and monotony of routine.  In this sense Opera Atelier’s production of Abduction From The Seraglio is just that, a relief from the minutiae of life.

Abduction From The Seraglio is about the kidnapping of three youths by a Turkish Pasha who installs them in his seraglio or harem and a rescue attempt by their friend.  It is about the emotions, and especially the passions of life in youth and the mercy of a foreigner with plenty of opportunity for humour.  I have always walked a fine line with Mozart’s humour.  On one hand it can seem to stretch new boundaries and eliminate innate prejudices but on the other hand it can be as the American comedian Bill Hicks would say, a lot of purple-headed dick jokes.  I tend to prefer it when new boundaries are stretched but this production seems more in tune with purple-headed dick jokes. 

Review: (Toronto) Peter Grimes

Anthony Dean Griffey (photo by Michael Cooper)

Suspicion
by Shannon Christy

Every group of people has a person who does not fit in.  Either their voice is too high, they laugh at the wrong time, or do not laugh at all, do not talk, or talk too much.  If something goes wrong they are the first one suspected.  Peter Grimes is the story about such a person who lives in a small village where his every move is cause for concern by all the good citizens.  It is a difficult and challenging opera because of the vocal range required for the select few who can sing Peter Grimes.  It is an even more challenging piece when your main singer cannot make it on opening night.  Again the COC rose to the challenge by managing to hire star Anthony Dean Griffey who provided the audience with a magnificent performance.

Peter Grimes is about a fisherman who is under suspicion in the death of an apprentice.  He is a loud boorish man with few friends and many enemies.  His sole objective is to work extremely hard so that he can earn enough money to buy his freedom and escape the prying eyes of his fellow villagers by getting a bigger and more isolated house for him and his apprentice.  Unfortunately and the suspicions of his fellow villagers are raised to a fever pitch. 

Review: (Toronto) Feng Yi Ting (Luminato)

(photo by Julia Lynn)

China Girl
by Shannon Christy

China is on pace to become the world’s largest economy by 2017.  Currently the country is serving the United States a big piece of humble pie on the world stage in the form of Eric Snowden a low level member of a private security firm who showed the planet that the United States has access to all of our information.  There goes the freedom.

The one thing the country does not produce enough of is girls.  Due to the single child policy Chinese families have produced a stunning amount of sons to daughters as male heirs are still the preferred choice.  With this in mind I was delighted by Luminato’s performance of this Chinese literary classic Feng Yi Ting.

Review: (Toronto) Americandream.ca

Pier Paquette (photo: Mikael Lavogiez)

Democracy is coming to the USA

by Shannon Christy

“No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.”
–James Madison, Political Observations, Apr. 20, 1795 in: Letters and Other Writings of James Madison, vol. 4, p. 491 (1865)

Americandream.ca is a play about Canadians and the erosion of their culture on an individual and macro level with the major historical dramas and characters of the United States from the last 50 years as a background.  It is a brilliant play that demands to be seen.

Writer and Co-director Claude Guilmain is ruthless in his portrayal of the hollow modern Canadian society.  

Review: (Toronto) Figaro's Wedding

Stephen Hegedus (photo by Darryl Block) 

Going to the Chapel
by Shannon Christy

Marriage is considered by a growing number of people as an unnecessary evil.  It is a huge expense on people strapped for cash, it is stressful, and more often than not it is not even that memorable.  Le Nozze di Figaro takes these points and puts them to music. Figaro's Wedding, an adaptation of Mozart’s most famous piece, takes the additional step of intermingling it with devices and events of our time. That they do this while providing beautiful performances is even better.  The story of Le Nozze di Figaro is about a couple of different love triangles with implied betrayal, confusion, and celebration tied in. It is comedy in its truest sense and if Against the Grain Theatre betrayed the original text by altering the words to fit our times, they certainly remained true to the comedic spirit of Lorenzo Da Ponte’s original creations.

That being said, the use of modern technology and the local references, especially the one that refers to how City Hall is cracking down, are great but it is the location and the performances that really set this show apart.

Review: (Toronto) Dialogues des Carmélites

Adrianne Pieczonka (centre) photo: Michael Cooper

Blinded by the light
by Shannon Christy

As fans of Gothic architecture know, the best-preserved cathedral in Paris is la Sainte Chapelle. This is mainly because during the Revolution it was used as a stable and the straw used to feed the horses worked as an excellent tool to preserve the interior paint. Thus in the Revolution’s attempt to discredit and destroy the past they inadvertently preserved it.

Dialogues des Carmélites is similar in its story of a Chapter of nuns located in France during the Revolution. The story’s central character, Blanche (played by Isabel Bayrakdarian) is a young woman scared of her own shadow who finds comfort in the monastic life. She then manages to ignore, or maybe overcome her fear in order to spend eternity with her fellow Carmélites.

This is a simple story with interesting, subtle twists that makes no attempts at cajoling the audience with sentimentality or explanation; as when, at one pivotal point, all of the sisters make a sudden and dreadful vow while the Second Prioress (Adrianne Pieczonka) is away.

Review: (Toronto) Salome

(l-r) Hanna Schwarz and Erika Sunnegårdh (photo: Michael Cooper)

You’re my obsession
by Shannon Christy

John the Baptist (Jochanaan) always struck me as a rock star. A mysterious man who comes out of the desert and immediately picks up some followers while snubbing his nose at the authorities. Until, one day, those same authorities arrest him and he is beheaded at the behest of one of their spoiled daughters, Salome.  

This is where my imagination ends and it is what separates me from a literary giant like Oscar Wilde and a musical genius like Richard Strauss.  These two men re-envisioned the story first as Mr. Wilde’s play and then Mr. Strauss’ opera. The Canadian Opera Company, in a spring dedicated to tragedies, has revived Atom Egoyan’s 1996 production (remounted in 2002) for a tense audience eager to rediscover this beautiful work. 

Review: (Toronto) The Magic Flute

Ambur Braid and Laura Albino (photo by Bruce Zinger)

Tempos off, Singers Lost
Opera Atelier's Magic Flute has serious problems
by Shannon Christy

I am tired of those painted boards in lieu of set. Can I say it loud enough? Can I? Gerard Gauci might be a talented painter exhibiting in Toronto and in Montreal, but I want a set. Not a 2D wall with 2 benches in front.

Opera Atelier’s production of The Magic Flute last night was terrible at best. It felt like a rehearsal, with everything going half tempo and the singers looking directly at the conductor half of the time, as if to make sure they were okay. One thing was sure all right: every singer’s part was very well spelled out. I guess it was a good thing since the opera is sung in English: the surtitles were barely needed but God! Was. It. Slow. By the time it is over you will be working hard to suppress the memory of seeing it. 

Review: (Toronto) Legoland

  Amitai Marmorstein and Celine Stubel (Photo: Barbara Pedrick)

The First Cut is the Deepest

by Shannon Christy

Atomic Vaudeville’s production of Legoland is a rich exploration of two intelligent teens who run headlong into catastrophe and discover that the world is a dangerous and cruel place where you must carefully pick what you love.  

The play itself is very fast paced, peppered with songs, dance, and puppets; seasoned with layered humour and quotes that ring in your head afterwards.  We learn that when it comes to theatre, “fuck” is actually appropriate if you are playing an urban youth; that syphilis surely had a hand in Shakespeare's and Nietzsche's great abilities; or that scarier than terrorism are the people who are afraid of it...

In a Word... Soprano Patricia Racette

(photo credit: Lisa Cuscuna)

Beyond Wiki and to The Club

Diva Patricia Racette reinvents

by Shannon Christy

Soprano Patricia Racette has appeared in the most acclaimed opera houses of the world including the Metropolitan Opera, San Francisco Opera, Lyric Opera of Chicago, Royal Opera House, La Scala, Paris Opera, and the Bayerische Staatsoper.  Known as a great interpreter of Janacek and Puccini, she has gained particular notoriety for her portrayals of the title roles of Madame Butterfly, Tosca, Jenufa, Kátya Kabanová, and all three leading soprano roles in Il Trittico. A champion of new works, Ms. Racette has created roles in a number of world premieres. Among them are the role of Leslie Crosbie in Paul Moravec’s The Letter at the Santa Fe Opera, Roberta Alden in Tobias Picker’s An American Tragedy at the Metropolitan Opera, the title role in Tobias Picker’s Emmeline at the Santa Fe Opera, (broadcast on PBS/Albany Records audio) and Love Simpson in Carlisle Floyd’s Cold Sassy Tree at the Houston Grand Opera (released on Albany Records). With the release of Diva on Detour, her breakout first cabaret album, Patricia Racette officially adds the cabaret genre to her performance platform.

CHARPO: What did you dream you would become as a child?  

RACETTE: I thought I would grow up to be a pop singer.. guitar in hand singing my own songs!

CHARPO: Name some of your mentors and influences and how they inspired you.

RACETTE:  Early on I loved some of the women of jazz-- I reference that on my album.. Ella Fitzgerald, Ernestine Anderson, Sarah Vaughan… but operatically, I was totally won over by Renata Scotto.  Many times I have told the story of being in my college dorm room-- devastated by the fact that my teacher told me that I should switch to opera from jazz.  My assignment was to learn SUOR ANGELICA's aria "Senza Mamma" and none other than Scotto was the recording I had.  Lucky me-- it turned my world upside down.. and that circle followed me even in recent years. Curious?!

Multi-Media, February 22, 2013

(photo credit: Lisa Cuscuna)

A Delightful Detour
by Shannon Christy

Patricia Racette: Diva on Detour is a fun album of the standards done by one of the best American opera stars. Set in a cabaret environment, this record is like spending an afternoon with a talented singer who has taken a detour from Opera to pursue another one of her passions, vocal jazz. 

Her very personal transitions from one song to the next make for an intimate setting: this could be a recording from a lounge bar of a nice hotel in Syracuse, New York. Ms. Racette introduces the songs with stories and biographical anecdotes  to create an intimate and casual atmosphere with the live audience. For example,  she describes how her mother, Jackie, wanted her to pursue opportunities with popular music instead of a career in opera and could not understand why “Pattie” was not singing every song with her “chest voice”.

Review: (Toronto) Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead

Ted Dykstra and Jordan Pettle (photo credit: Cylla von Tiedemann)

Same As It Ever Was
by Shannon Christy

Soulpepper's production pf Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead is as quirky, witty, and sharp as the original production by Tom Stoppard which makes me wonder why I didn’t just watch the movie the playwright directed on Netflix instead. 

The good qualities consist of Dana Osborne’s stage design and the soundscape by Mike Ross. There is no fourth wall: the audience surrounds the performers. This allows the spectators to feel as if they are literally stumbling across two confused men questioning everything around them, while allowing the actors to interact naturally with the audience. (At one point, Guildenstern discusses the relevance of their conversation, as he steps down from the stage and used me as a live example of audience boredom to Rosencrantz. What a great tongue in cheek joke; using the actual text he was given to challenge a live audience member at the same time… I couldn’t stop laughing at the idea - especially knowing that all the while, he was probably trampling that poor shopping bag a careless spectator had left in the alley.) In addition, Mike Ross’s soundscape with its clever use of effects, and great transitions is effective in giving the piece direction and grabbing audience attention. Unfortunately this and the set are among the only provoking concepts in this production.