Stephen Pedersen (formerly of the Halifax Chronicle Herald) has written a review of the latest Dal Opera Workshop — check out Stephen Pedersen’s blog for the story.
Cast handles lively score, pretty tunes in Offenbach’s classic
By STEPHEN PEDERSEN Arts Reporter
Sat. Feb 7 - 6:51 AM
After decades of movies, TV dramas and sitcoms, it’s always a surprise to discover how many belly-laughs a witty operetta from 150 years ago can trigger.
But the delight, as always, depends on the quality of the production. Dalhousie Opera Workshop not only meets this requirement but takes it over the top in its production of Jacques Offenbach’s satirical Orpheus in The Underworld which opened in the Dunn on Thursday night and continues tonight and Sunday afternoon.
It would be hard to find a livelier score with prettier tunes and more endorphin-tweaking dances than Offenbach’s. And it all climaxes with the happiest, hell-raisingest dance of all, the fiery Galop, which Paris’s naughty Moulin Rouge stole from Offenbach and renamed the can-can.
The Dalhousie production is full of inventive twists and modern staging — cellphones have invaded Mount Olympus, home of Jupiter and the other Greek gods, and the iPod, with savage poetic justice, has found a new home in Hell.
The youthful cast fills the stage with pretty, lively women and brawny, good-looking men. Egged on by a clever, hilarious new translation of the libretto by Jeremy Sams, and shoved over the conventional boundaries of inventiveness by the infectious goofiness of director Nina Scott-Stoddart, the actors have discovered their natural clown, and are, gratefully, entirely unself-conscious about it.
Their physical and vocal wit is full of spontaneity.
Jonathan McArthur as Pluto, disguised at the start as the shepherd Aristeus in order to seduce Orpheus’s wife Euridice, is comically effeminate before metamorphosing into the demonically deft emcee and mastermind of the Underworld. His affected manner appeals to Euridice (Katrina Weston), bored out of her mind by having to listen to another violin tune written by her husband Orpheus.
Except for the first scene, the remaining three in this operetta take place after death, beginning with an ambrosia slumber on Mount Olympus, and ending up with a wild party in Hell.
Josh Whelan plays a modern Jupiter, indulgent but in control, or so he thinks. He packs an awkwardly sized thunderbolt just in case. Whelan wittily conveys the contradiction within his character. Jupiter tries to be stern and lectures his children on morality, but they will have none of it. They know too much of his bizarre sex life. They mutiny, mounting a protest with pickets, when he gets too bossy.
Whelan punctures his own dignity by mincing off and on-stage at top speed, entirely on the tips of his toes.
The singing is very good, though prepare yourself for trebly voices — these are young singers. But their pitch and their intonation as well as their ability to sustain phrases is a delight.
Transcendent comic bits are too many to mention. Katrina Westin does a trim Public Opinion in a neat business suit, and Paul Medeiros, who plays the violin for Orpheus, does a terrific send-up of the concert virtuoso, and he has the chops to do it.
But the comic laureate award of the show goes to Matthew Beasant-McKeown whose performance as the ferryman John Styx is prime. His job, in Greek mythology, is to ferry the newly dead over Lethe, the river of forgetfulness. This John Styx is drunk on forgetfulness, frequently resorting to a flask of it he conceals on his person. It plays the devil with his short-term memory but one thing blazes through his consciousness: he is totally turned on by Euridice. She fends him off calling for Pluto to rescue her.
Gary Ewer conducts the show, which guarantees an alert ensemble able to play comedy without singing out of tune or messing up the ensemble. The Dalhousie Vocal Music studio, Greg Servant and Marcia Swanston, prepared the singers excellently, and pianist Dean Bradshaw supplied a light, sparkling touch to Offenbach’s scintillating score.
The show is double-cast, playing twice each on alternate performances over the four shows.
(spedersen@herald.ca)
Consul cast equal to challenge
Oatway ate show-stopping solo alive in a
By STEPHEN PEDERSEN Arts Reporter
Sun. Jul 27 - 7:59 AM
[Magda (Judith Oatway) confronts the Secret Police Agent (Greg Wagland) in Menotti’s The Consul. The Consul will be performed July 28 and 31 and Aug. 2 in the Dunn Theatre at 7:30 p.m. The opera has two casts with different singers on July 28 and Aug. 1.
]
Magda (Judith Oatway) confronts the Secret Police Agent (Greg Wagland) in Menotti’s The Consul. The Consul will be performed July 28 and 31 and Aug. 2 in the Dunn Theatre at 7:30 p.m. The opera has two casts with different singers on July 28 and Aug. 1.
I have to say at the start that Gian-Carlo Menotti is not one of my favourite composers. Especially in versions of his operas that, for want of funds, have to be accompanied by piano rather than orchestra. His orchestrations add a dimension to his music that softens its angularity and rounds off its sharper corners.
However, pianist Tara Morton, the musical director of Halifax Summer Opera Workshop, whose production of Menotti’s The Consul opened in the Dunn Theatre Friday night, is a first-rate accompanist. Her tempos are alert, her playing bold and ideally clear, her contribution not just important but indispensable.
The story is a mix of 20th century paranoia and bitterness at the heartlessness of bureaucracy. . Magda Sorel’s husband John, an outspoken critic of a middle-European totalitarian regime, is shot while running from the police. He hides out in the mountains, but refuses to cross the frontier until Magda, his infant son, and his mother can leave with him.
But Magda’s attempts to get exit visas are frustrated by bureaucracy in the person of The Secretary. Magda goes to see the consul, supposedly the American consul, but The Secretary’s often repeated refrain is he is too busy, come back tomorrow.
Magda and John’s baby is ill and needs medical attention outside the country. In any case, he dies before the end of the first act. Heartbroken and filled with anxiety, Magda waits to see the consul, implores the Secretary, and dreads that John will come back and be arrested and charged with treason.
The closest Magda gets to The Consul is an assurance that she can see him as soon as his important guest leaves. The guest turns out to be the head of the secret police.
Menotti is a master of dramatic effect. There are at least three show-stopping musical set pieces in The Consul. The first is an intense, forceful trio full of angst and passion sung by Magda, John and the Mother. The second is the Mother’s lullaby to the dying child, sung effectively by Oriana Dunlop.
The third is Magda’s well-known second act aria, To This We’ve Come. Soprano Judith Oatway ate this one alive, creating the opera’s most powerful moment with the intensity and force of her passion.
John, who is the most important person in the Sorel family, is not the focus of the opera, but Alfred Stockwell plays the character with the right amount of focus and intention.
Katie Stevenson as The Secretary is the opera’s most hateful character in the long run. She is cold as ice, immaculately dressed and as beautiful as Hans Christian Andersen’s Snow Queen. Yet, as the opera continues Stevenson introduces a faint trace of compassion which deepens her character memorably.
The opera, unquestionably, is melodramatic. It is both pot-boiler and hanky-wringer, shamelessly drawing out its heart-breaking moments, of which there are many.
Menotti also introduces an element of the surreal in the second act, by way of the character of Magadoff, a magician and hypnotist. Frustrated with being ignored by the Secretary after trotting out his best magical party tricks, he avenges his feelings of rejection, a parody of Magda’s, by hypnotizing all the people in the Consul’s waiting room and making them dance a waltz with phantom partners.
Even as you try to puzzle out what this scene is doing here, you realize that it is a plant, a preparation for the shamelessly melodramatic ending. At this point, Magda has just turned on the gas and put her head in the oven and we understand she is hallucinating in the moments before she dies.
All the characters from the waiting room return to take part in the final chorus, which of course is the blatantly transparent reason for the introduction of Magadoff in the second act.
Sure enough, Magda hears the telephone ringing and dies trying to reach it. We know from the previous scene that it is the Secretary calling to tell her that John had been caught in the Consul’s waiting room and been taken off by police..
It is not spoiling anything to tell you this, since it is all covered in the synopsis of the printed program.
Bottom line: this is a very good student production of a melodramatic score, made topical by the U.S. Homeland Security Act.
Opera vocals generously showcased
Two casts featured in production
By STEPHEN PEDERSEN Arts Reporter
Sat. Feb 2 - 4:46 AM
Dalhousie Music Department’s opera workshop production of act two of Johann Strauss’s evergreen operetta Die Fledermaus (The Bat) is a showcase for the lively young voices of the vocal department.
More than 30 singers, representing the first of two casts, filled the air with song and the stage with action in a production which, was for opera fans, the equivalent of a supersize meal at McDonald’s.
Not only was most of Strauss’s original second act intact, but since the entire act consists of a lavish party thrown by Prince Orlovsky for Vienna’s beautiful people, the production, directed by Nina Scott-Stoddart, made the most of the opportunity to stage an elaborate entertainment within the party in which 25 different singers sang solos, duets, trios, quartets, a quintet and a sextet from operas by Mozart, Offenbach, Rossini, Kurt Weill, Benjamin Britten and Douglas Moore.
It was, to say the least, a feast of melody and sweet singing.
Strauss’s music, as well as Mozart’s and Rossini’s, suit developing voices. They challenge virtuosity (as in Adele’s laughing song, sung Thursday by Katie Shelley with considerable brilliance of tone) as well as in Olympia’s song in which she’s a mechanical singing doll from Offenbach’s Tales of Hoffman (sung and acted most charmingly by Mary-Claire Sanderson) to the dramatic What Do You Intend To Do, Augusta? from Moore’s Ballad of Bay Doe and the dark Spinning Wheel Quartet from Britten’s The Rape of Lucretia.
Pulling this all together in a less than two hour show was a tour-de-force. The pace never lagged and Scott-Stoddart took advantage of the potpourri of styles and stories of the operatic vignettes to poke a little fun at what she clearly loves with a passion.
In Mozart’s La Ci Darem La Mano, everybody’s favourite duet from Don Giovanni (sung by two of Prince Orlovsky’s guests) in which the Don seduces a naive serving girl, the Zerlina (Katrina Westin) clearly loathed the Don Giovanni (Ben Yeon). Her struggle to overcome her dislike in order to appear to be seduced was wonderfully comic.
Julie Rudolph, in a trousers role, singing the part of Count Orlovsky, found a delightful way of being bored by his own party, while singing in a Russian accent in a stagey, deep voice, that all but failed to disguise its treble quality. The simple set (designed by Melissa Maislin) employed an ivory grand staircase, a settee or two and a large open space defined by a square ivory dance floor to contain the entertainments.
Dean Bradshaw whipped his fingers raw through the piano reduction of Strauss’s colourful orchestra part and Gary Ewer conducted the ensembles as needed.
Act two of Die Fledermaus continues tonight at 8 p.m. with the same cast as the opening performance, while the second cast performs Sunday at 2 p.m.
