Dalhousie Opera Workshop opens tomorrow!
Well, we had our second dress rehearsal this afternoon, and things are going scarily well. Here’s the article about the shows in today’s Halifax Chronicle-Herald:
Operatic love, lust, laughs
Dal music, theatre students stage triple bill
By STEPHEN PEDERSEN Arts Reporter
Three classic, comic American operas fill the bill for the Dalhousie Opera Workshop for a four-day run in the Sir James Dunn Theatre beginning Thursday night. All three are connected. The Telephone and The Old Maid and the Thief are by Gian Carlo Menotti. The third, A Hand of Bridge, is by Samuel Barber, but Menotti wrote the libretto.
Seventeen Dalhousie Music Department voice students cover 10 roles in the three short works. Guest director Nina Scott-Stoddart says the idea was to involve as many student singers as possible. “A lot of people auditioned. We double-cast everything.”
Since the voice division of the Dal Music Department has more women than men, “everything” does not include baritones Justin Simard and Leete Stetson, who each sing in two of the operas.
In The Telephone, subtitled L’Amour a Trois, Lucy (sopranos Catie Shelley and Becca Top) spends most of her time on the phone. Ben (Simard) “is a young businessman who loves Lucy and wants to marry her,” Scott-Stoddart says. “The phone is the third character in the opera. He’s ready to ask her to marry him, but she keeps being interrupted by the phone. Finally he leaves the house, goes to the train station and calls her on a payphone to propose. She has only one concern: whatever you do, don’t lose my number.”
The Telephone lasts for only 26 minutes. At eight minutes, Hand of Bridge is even shorter. Geraldine, David, Sally and Bill sit down to a hand of bridge.
“We had to call in a bridge consultant for that,” Stoddart says. “Geraldine is the emotional heart of the piece — her mother is dying. She laments ‘If only my mother could have loved me had I but let her.’ David fantasizes about becoming the richest man in the world. Sally is thinking about buying a peacock feather hat, and Bill is dreaming of his lover Cymbeline.”
The Old Maid and the Thief, one of Menotti’s best known and most-often performed comic operas, lasts an hour. The idea came to Menotti during a visit to Barber’s home in New England (Barber and he were life partners). Menotti was intrigued by the gossip in the small town.
In his opera, a classic Italian comic opera, Miss Todd, a spinster, takes in a young, handsome stranger named Bob. Because of rumours in the town about an escaped convict, Miss Todd and her maid Letitia believe he is the wanted thief. But he is charming. Eventually both maid and mistress end up stealing for him and in the end, Bob and Letitia steal Miss Todd’s car and run away together.
“It’s very light-hearted,” says Scott-Stoddart. “I don’t care about the misogyny. Miss Todd thinks it would be better to be killed by a man than to live without him. Letitia comes from a long line of operatic maids who turn the tables on their masters.”
The operas are fully staged and costumed. Gary Ewer will conduct and Dean Bradshaw accompanies on piano. Dalhousie voice professor Marcia Swanston prepared the singers.
“I thought it would be interesting to bring in an outside director,” Swanston said. Usually either she or professor Gregory Servant direct the Dal Opera Workshop productions.
The double-casting of A Hand of Bridge also includes Josh Whelan (David), Natalie Thimot and Kimberley Taylor (Geraldine), Leete Stetson and Andrew Pelrine (Bill), and Melanie Marlin, Allison Howlett and Emmerice Tremblay-Cornish (Sally).
In The Old Maid and the Thief, Miss Todd is sung by Julie Rudolph and Heather Flemming; Letitia by Sarah Barrett-Ives and Maureen Batt; the town gossip, Miss Pinkerton, by Kristy Assaly and Samantha Berardesca; and Bob by Justin Simard and Leete Stetson.
