Echo Chamber Toronto # 3: A Spectacular Soiree at Le Chat Noir

With this third programme, Echo Chamber Toronto has clearly arrived as a significant, innovative presenter of spectacular dance and beautiful music in the city.  It's the interplay and fusion of music with dance in these shows which makes Echo Chamber so different from almost any other programmer of either genre.

For financial reasons, most modern dance utilizes recorded sound, even in musical repertoire which could be presented by live artists.  Echo Chamber Toronto's Artistic Director, Aaron Schwebel, has refused to accept that this is an economic necessity.  And I say, more power to him!

This new programme featured a company of five dancers and seven musicians in an intriguing musical tribute to France in the first half of the twentieth century.  The hall of the 918 Bathurst Centre had a sizable dance floor area outlined in the form of a "T", with the crossbar across the front of the raised stage and the vertical shaft extending down the middle to the back of the hall; audience seats were arranged in short, angled rows on either side of the vertical shaft of the "T".  The musicians sat on the small raised stage.

The first half was presented musically by the Rosebud String Quartet and soprano Lauren Eberwein.  Three famous songs by Edith Piaf, including the iconic La vie en rose, were interspersed between the four movements of Ravel's 1904 String Quartet in F Major.  Some music lovers might cavil at the "interruptions" in Ravel's work, but when the choreography was married to the music the resulting ebb and flow proved to be just right.

Eberwein's voice, while undoubtedly a soprano, has a rich, dark, almost mezzo-soprano quality which accentuated the latent sadness in all of the Piaf songs.  Steadiness of tone and a lack of overt vibrato highlighted the nightclub quality of the music.  Clearly we were not listening to Edith Piaf herself, but the sensibility informing Eberwein's singing fitted the music hand in glove.

At the end of her second song, Eberwein sang the final lines as she walked down the side stairs and down the centre of the hall to the rear.  As the musicians launched into the second movement of the Quartet, two dancers shot forward from the rear down the centre of the hall as if fired from a cannon.

This spectacular entrance definitely fitted the mood of Ravel's music, marked Assez vif -- très rhythmé.  Joe Chapman and Skylar Campbell flew up and down the middle, back and forth across the front of the hall, twisted around and lifted each other, all with immense energy.  At the end of the hectic first part, they flew up onto the stage with a great leap just as Miyoko Koyasu appeared from behind the musicians for her more lyrical solo in the slower central section.  The moment when she slowly and pensively sat down on the front edge of the stage and as slowly lowered herself onto the dance floor changed the mood even more decisively than the music alone could do.  As the original scherzo resumed, Chapman and Campbell appeared again in a shortened version of their previous energetic dance, with Koyasu now joining them.

At the first show, I was seated halfway down the left side of the floor, and at one point in that energetic pas de deux a flying foot swept by my right ear so closely that I felt the wind ruffling the hair on that side of my head.  It isn't only the musicians and dancers who get integrated into an Echo Chamber show!

The third movement, Très lent, brought Koyasu and Campbell back for a slow, lyrical pas de deux whose classical lineage was as unmistakable as the modernity in the combinations of movements and positions.  The choreography of Alysa Pires served all of this music very well, with her signature fusion of classical line and flow with modern position and movement possibilities.

The first half ended with Eberwein and the quartet joining in a heartfelt reprise of La vie en rose before the quartet ripped into the fiery, high-speed finale of Ravel's masterpiece.

At a polar opposite in the world of mood, the second half of the evening began with Debussy's haunting, evocative flute solo Syrinx.  Meghan Pugh danced in a heartfelt solo, with flautist Shelley Brown facing her on the dance floor.  In a subtle but visually striking way, the ensuing duet took on an air of enchantment, with the dancer apparently falling under the spell of the musician.  Pugh's limpid execution belied the angular strangeness of some of the positions, as her arms and legs flowed easily in and out of the various intriguing poses.  In the final moments, the dance seemed to express a yearning for the dancer to be at one with the music -- which, come to think of it, represents exactly the purpose of the Echo Chamber Toronto performance series.

The striking choreography of Syrinx, and of the other dances in the second half, was created by the team of Liana Bellissimo and Tara Pillon.

In another shift of tone, Lauren Eberwein joined the pianist, Renee Rosnes, in a song by Erik Satie, La statue de bronze.  I totally wished to have a copy of the text, as I felt quite sure from the tone of the march-like music and the presentation of Eberwein that some sort of joke was involved -- however, from a rear seat, I was unable to pick up enough of the text to catch it.  Impressively clear tone on the ridiculously low final notes of the last vocal phrase.

The next work on the programme was the one which clearly signalled Echo Chamber Toronto's new significance as a musical and dance force in the city.  This four-movement suite for piano, strings, and flute, Of Mind and Body by Renee Rosnes, was commissioned by Echo Chamber Toronto with financial support from patrons John and Claudine Bailey.

It's a significant work in four movements, lasting for 20 minutes in total.  The first and third movements are predominantly slow, with the first evoking the orchestral music of Satie and the third similarly nodding towards Debussy (no more than a nod, in either case -- Rosnes definitely displayed her own individual voice as a composer).  The second and fourth, by contrast, deployed faster tempi and jazzy cross-rhythms to exhilarating effect.

Although the work as a whole was not danced, key sections of the two slower movements were choreographed (one of these, a pas de deux, we saw only in the second performance on Sunday).  One portion of a fast movement was also danced.  In these numbers we saw Meghan Pugh, Ben Rudisin, Liana Bellissimo, and Joe Chapman.  All danced with the same fascinating blend of liquid motion and angular precision which characterized Syrinx.

The programme concluded with another Erik Satie song, Je te veux.  Eberwein again sang, plainly enjoying the rolling waltz tempo and the borderline naughtiness of the lyrics.  It made for a lighter end to the evening.  It seemed to be a bit of a comedown after the dynamic climax of the closing pages in Of Mind and Body -- which really felt more like the natural endpoint of the performance.

Despite a major issue explained below, this was for my money the most accomplished and artistically successful Echo Chamber presentation yet.  Plainly, Aaron Schwebel and his team of artists continue to innovate, to explore, and to refine the possibilities within the mandate of the series.

It will definitely be fascinating to see in what direction the next show will take us all.

A final note:

In every programme there are always a few last-minute changes.  This is especially true of the classical/modern dance world, where injuries lurk in waiting at every corner.  One of the four dancers originally slated to appear in this performance was Jack Bertinshaw.  I was looking forward to seeing him perform; his dancing is always a delight.  Sadly, he suffered an injury the day before the show was to open.

This sort of thing is bad enough in a major ballet company, where the understudies and backups have been given these assignments and have at least had the benefit of working on the piece in studio.

Here, though, no such backup had been built in.  Two of Bertinshaw's National Ballet colleagues, Ben Rudisin and Joe Chapman, stepped in and divided Bertinshaw's considerable assignment between them.  This forced both of these dancers to learn a sizable chunk of complex, intricate choreography from scratch -- and a lot of it was learned on the day of the first performance.  One number had to be omitted in that show (the final pas de deux) but Chapman was able to learn it on the day of the second show, and dance it with Liana Bellissimo in that performance.

Chapman spoke of the generosity of a number of people in helping him.  But I want to turn that compliment around and highlight the generosity of Chapman and Rudisin in helping some colleagues out of a very difficult situation, almost at the literal last moment.  All in a day's work?  Perhaps -- but it takes an artist who is very much a class act to put himself into a situation like this.  Kudos, gentlemen -- not least on the fact that your dancing was so accomplished and polished that we wouldn't have known about the last-minute nature of your participation if we hadn't been told.

Toronto Symphony 2018-2019 # 3: Spectacular Sounds

Sonic spectacle was the name of the game at last night's Toronto Symphony Orchestra concert.

Some of my closest friends might take that to mean that Mahler was on the programme, but oddly enough that was not the case.

The concert opened with the overture to William Tell by Rossini.  This one joins the list of works I have heard twice in a short time period.  It's just a few years since the Teatro Regio of Torino brought a concert performance of the (somewhat) complete opera to the Roy Thomson Hall stage.

On this occasion, though, our own orchestra was conducted in this work by Simon Rivard, resident conductor of the TSO and conductor of the Toronto Symphony Youth Orchestra.  Rivard gave pleasing shape and nuance in the two quieter sections of the overture.  The opening Dawn prelude highlighted the splendid tone of the cello section.  The thunderstorm built up a massive yet still musical climax.  The concluding March of the Swiss Soldiers was given at a properly lively tempo, with crisp articulation of the repeated notes and pinpoint sforzandi.

Of course, someone always has to mention that the March was used as the theme music for the television series, The Lone Ranger.  Kind of ironic, considering that the series went off the air 62 years ago.  

The remainder of the concert was conducted by interim Music Director, Sir Andrew Davis.  After the Rossini, the orchestra was joined by soloist Louis Lortie for the Piano Concerto # 4 in C Minor, Op. 44, by Camille Saint-Saëns.  Although the solo part is filled with breathtaking virtuoso acrobatics, the concerto as a whole is written in such a way that the soloist is often expected to play quietly, adding the lavish decorative flourishes while the orchestra propounds the main thematic substance.  Lortie proved an ideal pianist for this unusual work, playing throughout with a lightness of touch and discreet use of the sustain pedal that lent clarity and distinction without weight and overpowering volume.

Not that his playing lacked power when it was needed -- far from it.  But the finest moments of Lortie's performance (there were many) came in the quieter passages where the music took on a real air of ethereal fantasy under his fingers.

The orchestral part (it's definitely not an accompaniment) was shaped by Davis with great care for balance, and played with appropriate gravitas in the opening pages, leading to sparkling wit in the scherzo and a light-hearted account of the finale, rather faster than any of the recordings I own.  That rapid tempo had the curious effect of tilting the centre of gravity in the work closer to the beginning, where a more sedate speed brings the work into a balance poised around the central scherzo.  Not a bad thing by any means, but it did materially alter the character of the concerto.  At any rate, it was a delight to hear this work performed live for the first time!

After the intermission came the premiere of a new work by Canadian composer Jordan Pal, Colour of Chaos.  This was my first encounter with this composer's music, and I came away with mixed reactions.  On the one hand, this work had a definite, clear rhythmic profile -- something which can be a rare privilege (or non-existent) in much contemporary music.  On the other hand, most of this 10-minute piece was loud.  Or louder.  Or -- well, you get the idea.  I was reminded of a violinist I know who complained that the Mahler Eighth Symphony gave her nothing to do but endless pages of tremolandos -- because that's what the TSO's violin section was mainly faced with.  Meanwhile, the brasses, winds, and extensive percussion section were engaged in a good deal of what another friend of mine refers to as playing blastissimo.

None of that in and of itself is necessarily a weakness, but in the end I felt that Pal was busily engaged in repeating notes rather than adding any musical substance after about the 4-minute mark.  For me, then, this was a work with some elements of strength but I was left with no desire to hear it again.

The concert concluded with Ottorino Respighi's showstopper tone poem, The Pines of Rome.  Davis and the orchestra captured the sense of playful jollity in the Pines of the Villa Borghese, and the brooding solemnity of the Pines near a Catacomb.  The moonlit half-tones of the Pines of the Janiculum hovered gently in the air.  The work concluded with a splendid, full-throated account of the Pines of the Appian Way, the march building to more and more thunderous heights with the six extra brass players positioned in the organ loft to give their playing even more oomph.  The final immense chords were discreetly underpinned by the organ pedals for even greater power.  An exhilarating end to a concert full of pageantry and spectacle, but also well-stocked with poetry and subtlety.

Theatre Ontario Festival # 5: Festival in Retrospect / Award Winners

This week has proven to be an unusually involving experience for me personally -- for reasons which I have mentioned in the reviews of the individual shows.

Each of the four plays has included themes, events, ideas, or words that have strongly pushed various emotional buttons related to difficult events of my life.

Why, then, can I truthfully say that the week has been an enjoyable experience?

This Festival has been cathartic.  The need to discharge emotional burdens related to crisis events doesn't end a year, or two, or three after the fact.  It can go on for very much longer -- even for a lifetime.  But theatre, like all the performing arts, has the ability to pull you out of yourself and experience these emotions in the mind, the heart, the life, of another human being.  It can be powerfully empathetic as well as cathartic.  More than once this week, I've been reminded of the words of choreographer James Kudelka when he created a ballet about death, loss, and grieving:

"Sometimes we have to make painful things beautiful 

to be able to look at them."

This Festival has been authentic.  It's a fashionable buzzword these days, but in this case it matters immensely.  None of the performances shirked the reality of the difficult issues that their characters faced.  The actors presented their characters with humility and total honesty as flawed, wounded human beings who had to try -- somehow -- to carry on.

This Festival has been challenging.  Even the funniest of the scripts challenged us to look in the mirror and see how our every word and action and thought can rebound into the lives of others around us.  If nothing else, this week's plays challenged all of us to become more compassionate, more truly open and accepting of the flaws of others.

This Festival has been difficult.  The theatre companies have taken on some mighty challenges in staging these painfully honest theatre pieces.  In other ways, the week has been difficult for the audiences.  I'm dead certain that I'm not the only person who has found it hard to see and hear some of what has been presented.  It's a truism that difficult tasks and situations carry greater rewards than easy ones.  But it's a truism because it's true.

This Festival has been stimulating -- for all of the above reasons.

To all the theatre artists whose months of hard work, on and off the stage, have led to this week-long look into the mirror, I say humbly and gratefully, "Congratulations."

I also must commend all of the volunteers who laboured so mightily behind the scenes to organize the entire Festival.  The test of a good Festival is not whether there were glitches -- there always are (three-time Festival Chair's voice of experience speaking here).  The acid test is whether Festival goers realize that there have been glitches.  Generally, we didn't.  Congratulations for that.

The warm-hearted welcome we received all week from the members and volunteers of the Curtain Club, Richmond Hill's oldest community theatre, made us all feel right at home.  A note for all future Festivals: the detailed map with marked routes connecting the different restaurants and Festival venues was a great help and very much appreciated by this visual learner!

And a huge thank-you to all my Festival friends, a theatrical family indeed, for another wonderful week of sharing and caring for and with each other.  Damn, we're good!

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Here are the award winners, as chosen by adjudicator Carolee Mason.

The first group, the Adjudicator's Awards, can be awarded for any facet of any production as the Adjudicator sees fit.

[1]  Adjudicator's Award for Assistant Stage Manager's On-Stage Food:

Susan Poole (Late Company, Bloor West Village Players)



[2]  Adjudicator's Award for Original Music:

Vern Dorge (This Is How We Got Here, Gore Bay Theatre)


[3]  Adjudicator's Award for Irish Set Dressing:

Whitney Purdy (Outside Mullingar, Domino Theatre)



[4]  Adjudicator's Award for Amazing Spectacle of Movement:

Hala Miller (Dance Captain) and the company of Girls Like That (Theatre Sarnia)


[5]  Adjudicator's Award for Strength in Storytelling:

The Company of This Is How We Got Here (Gore Bay Theatre)


The remaining awards are all to be presented in the designated categories of achievement.


[6]  Outstanding Co-ordinated Production :

The winner of this award is chosen by the Festival Production Managers

The Crew of Girls Like That (Theatre Sarnia)



[7]  Outstanding Visual Presentation:

Andrea Emmerton and Walter Maskel (This Is How We Got Here, Gore Bay Theatre)


[8]  Outstanding Technical Achievement:

David L. Smith (Outside Mullingar, Domino Theatre)


[9]  Outstanding Performance in a Supporting Role:

Will Smith as "Jim" (This Is How We Got Here, Gore Bay Theatre)


[10]  Outstanding Performance in a Supporting Role:

Sandie Cond as "Aoife Muldoon" (Outside Mullingar, Domino Theatre)


[11]  Outstanding Performance in a Leading Role:

Lydia Kiselyk as "Debora Shaun-Hastings" (Late Company, Bloor West Village Players)


[12]  Outstanding Performance in a Leading Role:

Geoff Johnson as "Anthony Reilly" (Outside Mullingar, Domino Theatre)


[13]  Outstanding Director:

Valary Cook (Late Company, Bloor West Village Players)


[14]  The "Elsie" Award for Outstanding Festival Production:

Outside Mullingar (Domino Theatre)

Theatre Ontario Festival 2019 # 4: Not Just Like That

GIRLS LIKE THAT

by Evan Placey

Directed by Henri Canino

Presented by Theatre Sarnia

representing the Western Ontario Drama League


This review will be a bit different from the others in this series, since I already saw Girls Like That at the Western Ontario Drama League Festival in March, and wrote a detailed review of the show at that time.  This review, therefore, will focus on any changes I've noticed and on any further thoughts or reactions that have come to me.

You can read the original March review here:    Nervy, Incisive Theatre Piece

Theatre Sarnia's production of Girls Like That retains all of the power and strength of the previous staging.  The show remains nervy, incisive, cutting-edge, and definitely mold-breaking in many ways.  This remount made no major changes in the style or presentation of the piece.  The slight differences which I did pick up represented a mixture of gains and losses.

On the plus side, the recorded music wasn't as painfully loud as it had been in Guelph.  This may have been a matter more of the different size and shape of the auditorium than anything else.  More on that idea in a moment.

The flashing, strobe-like colour projections on the back screen also were less intense than before.  This mattered to me because I lost some interesting visuals of the show in Guelph when I had to close my eyes and cover them with my hand to ward off a fast-rising headache.  Last night I got to see some of those interesting moments.  Another gain.

This show has always been tight -- crisp, snappy, quick cue pick-ups, sharply articulated text.  In this performance, some of the text came flying out at us so quickly that the words were getting lost in a blur.  That was especially true of the moments when each actor in turn calls out one word.  The actors were picking up their cues so quickly that each word was running over the one before it.  The energy and passion for the material were unmistakable, but the actual text in those spots vanished.

A friend commented to me afterwards that the speed and tightness of the show made us unwilling to let out some well-earned laughs, simply because we were afraid to miss the next line.

Back to the auditorium.  The theatre we've used this week in Richmond Hill is wider and deeper than the Guelph theatre, but most of all it is far higher.  So the "quieter" music and the blurry text may simply have been a case of that extra cubic volume of space swallowing too much sound.  Since every hall is different, a company may need to adjust the style of their delivery of lines as well as the volume of sound to match different halls.  That's a necessity for classical musicians, but I think it might well apply to a couple of the shows we saw this week, not just this one.

On the plus side, the actor portraying the bullied Scarlett soared to greater dramatic heights of scorn and disdain for her peers in her report about her female ancestors.  Her strength and truth in this scene drew exclamations of approval for Scarlett (the character, not the actor) from audience members seated around me.  This made for an even stronger emotional climax to Scarlett's journey, and to the play as a whole.

On my side, since I didn't disconnect this time during the last minutes of the show after that speech, I properly understood the meaning of the final scene of the girls (including Scarlett) all linking arms!

This show developed an added resonance as a result of the other work done here at this Festival.  In every single play this week, the issue of suicide and of survivors coping with suicide has been raised -- sometimes in passing, sometimes as the heart of the matter.  In this show, it comes at the point where the girls hear that Scarlett has gone missing and that a body has been found in the river.  Those scenes struck some of us who've been here all week with added impact and poignancy.

Girls Like That marked a powerful end to a powerful, intense Festival.


* * * * * * * * * *

Theatre Ontario Festival is an annual event which brings together the "best of the best" in Ontario's community theatres for a celebration of excellence. The four participating plays are invited as the winners of the four regional festivals. Each performance is adjudicated in detail by a professional theatre artist, in sessions which enhance learning and theatre experience for the performing company and audience alike. The adjudicator this year is Carolee Mason. Along with the performances, the Festival also includes workshops on various theatre topics, Playwright-in-Person readings, and other additional events. The week culminates with a celebration brunch when awards are presented.

Theatre Ontario Festival 2019 # 3: The Farce of Caution

OUTSIDE MULLINGAR
by John Patrick Shanley
Directed by Ian Malcolm
Presented by Domino Theatre
representing Eastern Ontario Drama League (EODL)

It's something of a rarity in this day and age for a writer to set out on a conscious effort to pen a love story for the theatre.  But Outside Mullingar is a play that combines much wisdom and experience with a quiet rural setting, somewhat lost characters and a dash of good old-fashioned romance -- and the resulting mixture yields some laughs, some deep thought, a few tears, and a beautiful and intriguing set of human relationships.  I found the play both fascinating and involving the first time I saw it staged (two years ago) and it remains all of that and then some in this production.

I suspect that not a little of my affection for Outside Mullingar arises from my age, basically the same as the author, and from the choice of a rural Irish setting which in so many ways reminds me of the small communities which I've visited in Scotland's Outer Hebrides.  These sixties in my life are an age when the "might-have-beens" begin to surface more and more in my thoughts, and I suspect in Shanley's thoughts as well.  In expressing his own feelings, Shanley has said that reaching the age of 60 awoke him to "the fleeting opportunities of life, the farce of caution."  The most endearing aspect of this play is the way that it takes the "might-have-beens" of a couple of neighbours, eggs them on into discarding the farce of caution, and turns their lives into "will becomes" right before our eyes.

This script is loaded with good laugh lines, and the audience on Friday night joined in with a will right from the first exchange of pointed remarks.  But these are not stuck-on or gratuitous laughs; they rise, completely naturally, out of the contrasting personalities of the quartet of characters, and out of the relationships which bind them all to each other in a web of friendship and familial love.  The author's care to keep the characters paramount also ensures that all of the laughter carries with it the rueful recognition of ourselves in the people we see brought to life upon the stage.  Many moments of this play feel uncannily like looking in a mirror.

Despite some minor difficulties, Domino Theatre's cast and crew mounted a cohesive, smoothly-running show which seemed far shorter than its 100-minute running time.  Unlike the last production I saw, this company ran the entire show without intermission.

That's a good place to start, because the play is definitely naturalistic, and as definitely requires three settings -- Anthony's kitchen, Rosemary's kitchen, and an outdoor shed with at least a deep eaves under which the characters can shelter from the rain.  In an ideal world with near-unlimited time and money and an ideally-equipped space, this could best be done with a revolve.

Domino's solution was effective, with a technical caveat.  When we arrived in the theatre, we saw the kitchen and sitting area of the Reilly home, with Tony's armchair situated forward of the kitchen table.  This box set was placed over at stage right, with the stage left wall angled very sharply away from the room so that audience on the far side of the theatre could see the space.  At the outer end of the angled wall was a separate, smaller set piece which created the shed and its roofed entrance.  At the end of the first act, the shed was rolled across from stage left to stage right and the angled wall was pivoted around to the opposite angle so that we now saw the Muldoon kitchen on the stage left side of the space.  All this took place in a matter of seconds, and allowed for the entire play to flow smoothly without the intermission break that would normally take place at this point.

But...

(you just knew that was coming, didn't you?)

…that rolling set piece didn't roll quite far enough, and about 20 seats at the front corner of the auditorium were left with only a partial view of the Muldoon kitchen.  I was told that one audience member called the second half of the show "a nice radio play" because she couldn't see most of what happened in that kitchen.  Well, we all know that live theatre without glitches just does not happen, especially when transferring a show into a totally unfamiliar space with only the one work day to make it all cohere.

Note:  For those not familiar with the Festival format, each group

 gets to enter the  theatre  for the first time at 8:00 am on their

 performance date.  They have 9-10 hours to put up the set, 

aim and  focus lights, test sound levels, run through critical 

sequences for technical purposes, give the actors a chance 

to work and rehearse  on the unfamiliar stage, and then 

get out of the hall so that the house management can clean 

and set the auditorium before the 8:00 pm performance.  

The company then has to strike their entire production 

out of the theatre after the show, to leave it ready for the 

next day's company to enter.

Visually, the set showed us two old-fashioned and well-lived-in country cottages.  I wondered if the director and designer had interpreted the "next door" of the script to mean "two halves of a semi-detached house," because the two rooms were nearly mirror images of each other and similar in the basic décor of walls and shape/size of windows.  Set dressing and props were well-chosen for colour and for age -- the old-fashioned "portable" tube TV was a good example.

Lighting effects and settings were effective.  The lighting plot created a warm but not-over-bright interior for the two kitchens, and a much more subtle look with a good practical light for the shed.  The lightning special was believable too.

Music tracks employed throughout the show were well-chosen for their emotional content.  Sound levels were excellent for the music, but at one point the very believable soundscape of outdoor animal/bird sounds was a bit too loud for the actors on the shed set.

The relationships among the four characters were strongly drawn by this cast.  As the play opens, Aoife Muldoon has just buried her husband, Christopher.  Although the opening conversations flow from this event, he is soon left behind as the two parents (Aoife Muldoon and Tony Reilly) cope with their own illnesses and impending ends while their children (Rosemary Muldoon and Anthony Reilly) face the possibility of middle age alone extending into their own old age.

But then there are the emotional undercurrents, which extend across the invisible boundaries between the two homes as well as between generations in each family.  The company did an excellent job of letting us see and sense those undercurrents long before the dialogue clued us in to what was actually going on.

David Hurley played the bluff and blustery Tony with plenty of verbal vim and vigour to contrast with his elder's difficulty of movement.  Hurley's splendidly clear voice and diction allowed all of his lines to register.  He made us totally believe in this man who says whatever crosses his mind, not so much because he doesn't care what anyone thinks of his words, but because he has no clue that anyone else even has a thought in their heads.  In his final moments, there was real poignancy in his announcement that he hadn't loved Mary (his wife) but had married her only "because she would have me."  A moment later, the balancing description of the moment when he realized that he truly had come to love her was both heartfelt and beautiful in the poetry of his voice.

Geoff Johnson played the painfully shy Anthony in such a way that his voice sounded like a weaker, less certain echo of his father.  This Anthony blustered too, but with far less assurance, conviction, or pomposity.  In the second act, I could totally relate to his shyness and inability to see where Rosemary was trying to steer him.  The moment when he announced why he had bought the flashy metal detector became terribly real, as his emotion drove him to burst through the wall of shyness and self-abasement and state for the first time (albeit indirectly) that he loved Rosemary.

Sandie Cond drew all eyes from her first entrance as Aoife Muldoon.  Although her old-fashioned mourning garb was eye-catching, what really caught my attention was her intent, aware facial expression.  Here was a woman who would always hear more than was said, and see more than what was shown.  Her tart little remarks were nailed with impeccable timing, and her assurance and authority in every pronouncement were most believable.  It was also plain that Aoife knew exactly what Rosemary was trying to achieve in Act 1, and quite likely figured it out without Rosemary ever actually telling her.

While Outside Mullingar is plainly an ensemble piece, the Rosemary of Dympna McConnell gave this performance its strong centre of gravity.  The angry spitfire of Act 1, the depressed farm spinster, the graceful swan, the longing soul awash in romantic yearning, all these elements combine to create a complex and oddly appealing character.  McConnell's great strength came from the assurance with which she inhabited each of these complex emotional centres, making every one in its turn utterly believable.  The flexibility of her vocal tones had not a little to do with the reality of her performance.

The cast as a whole team achieved splendid results in their accents.  The previous production I saw included one genuine Irish brogue which was too thick to carry well off the stage.  I felt that these accents, while perhaps not 100% genuine, were all clearly Irish while remaining clearly understandable to the non-Irish ear.  The acid test for me is whether the inherent musicality of English spoken by Irish people can be heard -- and I definitely heard that music at many key points in this show.  This is one situation where I have always felt that the theatre ought to err on the side of realism rather than reality.  And yes, there is a difference.

Director Ian Malcolm achieved some splendid stage pictures on this unusual set, and crafted a well-paced production.  With plenty of ebb and flow in the rhythms, there was ample variety but no sense of any slackness or dropping of the ball at any time.  The cast created the ideal laugh pauses, the kind where you aren't aware that they are pausing for the laughs.

A final word on the unconventional choice to play the show as a single unit without intermission.  While this was cleverly handled, I felt it was unnecessary.  There is a significant and clearly defined lapse of several years between Act 1 and Act 2, and during that lapse of time two dramatically important events occur.  The intervening deaths of Aoife and Tony change the circumstances of Rosemary and Anthony so materially that continuity between the two acts is not important, and in fact not desirable.

But overall, a splendid evening of entertaining, amusing, and thought-provoking theatre.

* * * * * * * * * *


Theatre Ontario Festival is an annual event which brings together the "best of the best" in Ontario's community theatres for a celebration of excellence. The four participating plays are invited as the winners of the four regional festivals. Each performance is adjudicated in detail by a professional theatre artist, in sessions which enhance learning and theatre experience for the performing company and audience alike. The adjudicator this year is Carolee Mason. Along with the performances, the Festival also includes workshops on various theatre topics, Playwright-in-Person readings, and other additional events. The week culminates with a celebration brunch when awards are presented.

Theatre Ontario Festival 2019 # 2: Speaking Our Truth

THIS IS HOW WE GOT HERE
by Keith Barker
Directed by Andrea Emmerton and Walter Maskel
Presented by Gore Bay Theatre
representing the QUONTA Drama Region (Northeastern Ontario)

For the second night in a row, the audience at the Theatre Ontario Festival has witnessed a Canadian play dealing with the fallout from suicide.  It's been a devastating experience for those of us who've actually had to travel that road, and that's putting it mildly.  Dark as they are, though, these plays are also strongly life-affirming, and both theatre companies producing them found that affirmation.  Without that positive power, the experience would have been far bleaker.

Despite the commonality of theme, I was much more struck by the way in which these two playwrights have explored complementary aspects of grieving for a suicide.  Between the two plays, we've experienced a wide range of actions and reactions which different people can encounter as they deal with such a tragic death.

Keith Barker's script is very different in form and structure from Jordan Tannahill's play which we saw on Wednesday night.  Setting and characters bring us to a different world -- the rural, forest environment of Northern Ontario instead of the urban sophistication of Ottawa.  But the real difference lies in the construction of Barker's play, which leaps backwards and forwards in time across a period of a year.  Instead of the continuous flow of action in real time which we got on Wednesday, this piece is an assemblage of vignettes, some brief, some extended, but none lasting for more than a few minutes.

The success of a play like this depends -- like a good murder mystery -- on providing the audience just enough information to keep them engaged in the mystery without giving too much away too quickly.  That "just enough" is a tricky, loaded phrase, but can be taken to mean that there has to be enough detail to engage the audience in the story and to keep them engaged until all the pieces have unfolded and the full picture can be seen in retrospect.  This kind of script creates major challenges for the offstage departments as well as for the actors.

The highly stylized visual and audio elements of this production are familiar indeed to those who've witnessed the previous work of co-directors Emmerton and Maskel over the years.  Scenes are introduced and linked with multi-coloured light effects against a cyclorama backdrop.  These light effects are accompanied by gentle background music composed and performed by Vern Dorge.  The stage set is crafted out of skeletal shapes and forms, some standing, some suspended in front of the cyclorama.  

Those stage set shapes, in this case, were plainly trees, but equally plainly constructed.  Neither meant nor designed to look natural, they resembled evergreen trees drawn by a young child with a broad paint brush.  Placement on the stage allowed the actors to move freely between and among the trees in the forest scenes, while there was ample room in front of the forest for scenes in other places (a home, a garden) to be played out.  This evocative setting worked beautifully for the piece.

On the other hand, I found the convention of bridging between the scenes hindered the flow of this play at times.  We simply spent too much time watching coloured lights while figures in shadow moved off, followed by others moving on, always at a moderate pace as dictated by the one ruminative musical selection which was played at nearly every scene change.  This type of evocative and thoughtful transition worked best with the shifts in and out of the fox's story.  But I definitely felt that the briefer scenes among the characters would be better served by having actors for the upcoming scene enter at, say, stage right while the actors of the preceding scene were still making their exit at stage left.  A transition like this could also be done without music, and could therefore move at a brisker speed.  This would keep the play as a whole flowing more smoothly and integrally, without continual drops in the dramatic temperature which we experienced.  

The choppiness which this stylized scene change model forced on the script was unfortunate, because the pacing and timing within each scene was admirable.  So was the sense of commitment and teamwork among the four actors.

Each of the four gets a chance to step to the front of the stage at some point in the play to recite part of the story of a fox who was himself a storyteller.  In the end, we learn that this tale came from a childhood book which Lucille and Paul read so often to Craig that the book finally fell apart.  These four storytelling sequences gave each actor a chance to create a different atmosphere by stepping out of self-character to become self-as-storyteller.  It's almost inevitable that anyone telling a story to a small child will adopt a different voice from their normal, everyday speech -- and equally inevitable that some will show bigger differences than others.  The four actors all varied their speech, but in different degrees, which lent an important air of realism to their storytelling.

Each also presented a character with varying strengths.

Tara Bernatchez created a compelling portrait of Lucille, the mother of the dead Craig.  In her first scene she sat, rigid of face and body, frozen into an immobile block by the emotions which she could not allow herself to release.  As the play progressed, subsequent scenes showed her gradually opening up ever so little, until the scene in which she finally snapped wide open, screaming that these were her feelings and nobody else got to tell her how to feel.  That moment of self-admission finally set her on the road of true grieving, a whole year after her son's death.

A key element in her story is the relationship between her and the fox which loiters consistently just outside the imaginary limits of the garden where she so often sits.  For several scenes she treasured an egg which the fox had brought to her, because of her certainty that the fox was the spirit of Craig returning to comfort her.  In an intriguing reversal of the expected symbolism, it was the breaking of the egg (traditional symbol of new life and new birth) which allowed her to continue her journey towards  recovery of herself.  In all of her scenes, Bernatchez made effective use of multiple shades of vocal tone in projecting her tides of conflicted feeling.

Her older sister, Liset, was played by Shannon McMullan, who similarly made good use of a strong and flexible voice to great effect.  She had some of the funniest moments of the play, as she conversed with the invisible fox -- her expressive face adding spice to her threats and comments to the animal.  Once or twice I felt that her physicality in the sequences where she was speaking to the fox became a little too "stagey" to seem truthful.  Liset was the character who tried hardest to "move on," and thus displayed the most impatience with Lucille who approached the tragedy from the diametric point of refusing to move on at all.   McMullan certainly captured that impatience.

Liset's husband, Jim, was brought to life by Will Smith.  If the phrase "good ole boy" can be applied to a man from northern Ontario (rather than from the Deep South of the USA) then it certainly would describe Jim.  Bluff, hearty, certainly neither subtle nor particular aware of the feelings of others, Jim remained likable because of his good intentions.  If all this sounds suspiciously like caricature, his key scene near the end of the play dispelled that belief.  Smith's performance of the heart-rending monologue where he describes Craig's death by hanging was the biggest emotional knockout punch of the evening.  All the heartiness fell away and exposed the naked pain underneath.  Smith's timing and pacing were perfected at the moment when Jim told Paul that Craig did what he did so that the father he loved wouldn't be the one to find him after his death.

As Paul, Craig's father, John Robertson handled well the bewilderment which was one of his key emotions.  What emerged clearly, in face and voice, was a strong sense of caring and love towards his son, combined with an equally strong inability to comprehend that Craig was and would have remained an entirely different kind of person from himself -- quieter, more sensitive, less stereotypically manly.  His silent but complex reactions to Jim's final revelation were powerfully compelling and entirely believable.

Robertson touched a deep core of truth in the final scene where he discovered Lucille in the forest, and the two gently and quietly reconciled.  And I did feel, from the tone of both actors in this scene, that their reconciliation would last.  I truly wished that for them.

If there's an acid test for a performance of a play like this, it surely resides in the need for the audience to feel invested in the characters and their fates -- and this company passed the test with flying colours.

In the end, This Is How We Got Here involves us as audience in the same struggle depicted in Late Company -- the battle to speak our truth when confronted with the shock of the suicide of someone we love.  With sincerity, humour, and -- above all -- with compassion, this production from Gore Bay Theatre has brought that truth to vivid, empathetic life.

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Theatre Ontario Festival is an annual event which brings together the "best of the best" in Ontario's community theatres for a celebration of excellence. The four participating plays are invited as the winners of the four regional festivals. Each performance is adjudicated in detail by a professional theatre artist, in sessions which enhance learning and theatre experience for the performing company and audience alike. The adjudicator this year is Carolee Mason. Along with the performances, the Festival also includes workshops on various theatre topics, Playwright-in-Person readings, and other additional events. The week culminates with a celebration brunch when awards are presented.

Theatre Ontario Festival 2019 # 1: Waiting for Absolution

LATE COMPANY

by Jordan Tannahill

Directed by Valary Cook
Presented by The Bloor West Village Players
representing Association of Community Theatres -- Central Ontario (ACT-CO)

It's a massive understatement to say that this was a tough play for me to watch, to listen to, to live in.

Multiple threads of my life were pulled up to the surface and tied into emotional knots by this piece, which is based on a true incident. For anyone who has experienced bullying at any age, in any form, or anyone who is a survivor of a suicide, this story can be nothing less than devastating. For anyone who's a member of the LGBTQ communities, the play is a stark reminder of the unforgiving, unaccepting sides of the world we live in. As author Jordan Tannahill himself has pointed out, there are still many places in the world where this play could not and would not be staged.

Tannahill's writing has a broad comic streak in places, which can help to make the bitter truths of the piece easier to swallow for many in the audience. I didn't begrudge the performers the laughs they drew, but for me the play cut too close to home. I couldn't laugh.

The most striking aspect of the script for me was its refusal to take sides, to assign guilt, to judge this one or to let that one off the hook. There's no neat resolution, no happy ending, no tying up of loose ends. The evening ends as it began, with all five characters still waiting "for an absolution that will never come" (to quote an apposite line from James Cameron's Titanic).

The great strength of this production lay in the various moments when each character in turn went on the attack. What these actors made painfully apparent was that the five people before us each came to this dinner evening carrying immense emotional burdens and hoping for some kind of validation, vindication, perhaps even forgiveness -- and that their explosions erupted as each one realized that she/he was not going to get away scot-free.

On the other hand, the cast had more variable success in staying in the moment during their quieter portions of the show.  Some were clearly present at all times, but one or two lapsed occasionally into actor-waiting-for-next-cue attitudes.

In some ways, the strongest performance of the evening was given by Dylan Mills-Capote as the sullen Curtis.  Head consistently dropped, voice muted but still audible, telegraphic sentences clipped off short, he gave a totally convincing portrayal of a teenager who's been called on the carpet and feels that he's being unfairly hit with all the blame -- as, in the context of this gathering, he is.  Every one of his few remarks was pointed and timed with a near-ideal degree of precision and sharpness.  His very stillness in most scenes highlighted the way that he was always present and very much in the moment, even though still and silent.

Andrew Horbatiuk as Bill (father of Curtis) gave a convincing portrayal of the man who feels sure that he is in the clear and thinks he can just push his way through the ordeal and come out the other side unscathed.  Even so, we could clearly sense the underlying guilt about not knowing what his son had been doing -- the line about, "I know what my son is up to in his bedroom" had all the firmness of a melted stick of butter.  What could have been stronger here was the sense of betrayal when his wife does not completely back him up.

Andrea Lyons first appeared as something perilously close to caricature -- the caricature of the giggly airhead -- but within a few moments it became apparent that the giggles were a coping mechanism to help Tamara (Curtis' mom) handle the pain which was confronting her.  Tamara, of all the characters, was the one caught in the middle -- wanting to back her husband, needing to comfort her son, and still instinctively responding to and yearning to console a mother who's suffered loss.  One or two of her sudden emotional gear changes didn't entirely convince me, but on the whole this was a portrayal which rang true.

Rob Candy presented a smooth, controlled exterior as Michael, the politician who was father of the dead Joel.  Constant preoccupation with appearances underlay his every word and look.  When he did snap, the change was both startling and utterly human for the first time.    

Lydia Kiselyk centred the play as the bereaved mother, Debora.  She vividly portrayed a woman with a real need for control, for order, for assurance.  The loss of her son, and the revelations about his life that she uncovers during the play, all conspire to undermine and dislocate her in the most extreme ways.  This character has to make some of the sharpest turn-on-a-dime emotional transitions I've ever seen in theatre, and Kiselyk nailed it consistently.  The one moment in her performance that didn't quite ring true for me was the moment when she zeroed in on Curtis, demanding to know what he felt, if anything, when he wrote his letter.  For just those few lines the emotion came across as calculated, where all the rest of her performance was deeply felt.  Don't underestimate for a moment the difficulty of playing a character who has to go right down into the depths of emotional hell.

One of the reasons Debora centres the play so strongly is because the space in which the action unfolds is so clearly her place.  Theresa Arneaud's design for this cool, crisp room with its stylish walls, clean-edged furniture, ghost chairs at the dining table, and more, says nothing to me about Michael but speaks volumes about Debora.  Of course, the dramatic sculpture which draws focus to centre stage is hers -- created before Joel's death caused her artistic well of inspiration to run dry.  The monochrome black-white-grey colour palette of the room, echoed in her clothes, also speaks volumes.  As the play goes on, and we learn more about Joel's sense of play, love of colour, fluid sexuality and scorn of convention, it becomes clearer and clearer that he can never have felt much at home, either in this house, or with these parents.  

A couple of moments were deeply moving indeed.  After Tamara slapped Debora hard across the cheek, Curtis disappeared into the kitchen, to reappear with an ice cube in his hand which he gently applied to her face.  This action came across as genuine compassion from Curtis, contrasting with the faux, carefully-scripted contrition of his letter -- which I felt completely sure had been written by his mother.  Another was the moment when Debora left the dinner table to burst into tears in the kitchen, and Tamara instinctively went after her to comfort and calm her.

The very end of the play showed Michael and Debora sitting down to watch one of Joel's YouTube videos, "one of the funny ones."  It's a truly gripping vignette, as they come face to face with their son, but not as they had ever seen or heard him before.  For just a moment, as they smile and then laugh at Joel's filmed performance, you can believe in the possibility of a happy ending.  But in real life, as those who grieve know all too well, you just don't get off that easily.

But then Curtis returns, by himself, and stands looking at them as they stare at him and the lights slowly fade.  Tannahill's masterstroke, this Rorschach ending invites -- demands -- all kinds of speculations about why Curtis returns, and what he plans either to say or to do.  One can only guess.

* * * * * * * * * *

Theatre Ontario Festival is an annual event which brings together the "best of the best" in Ontario's community theatres for a celebration of excellence. The four participating plays are invited as the winners of the four regional festivals. Each performance is adjudicated in detail by a professional theatre artist, in sessions which enhance learning and theatre experience for the performing company and audience alike. The adjudicator this year is Carolee Mason. Along with the performances, the Festival also includes workshops on various theatre topics, Playwright-in-Person readings, and other additional events. The week culminates with a celebration brunch when awards are presented.

The Ring at the Met # 5: The Epic Conclusion in "Götterdämmerung"

In some ways, the final opera of the Ring, Götterdämmerung ("The Twilight of the Gods"), can feel like a bit of a throwback to an earlier era of Wagner's career.  It contains a number of passages which come close to being detachable, stand-alone numbers, and has far more outward physical activity and conflict among characters than any of the other three.  It's the only drama in the cycle to include parts for a chorus, as well as including a dozen named characters.  It's also the only opera of the Ring with multiple passages of genuine ensemble writing (apart from some brief passages in Das Rheingold).

The simple reason for the retrograde aspects of the piece is that Wagner began writing the poem (libretto) which eventually became Der Ring des Nibelungen right here -- with its ending.  And he began it right after the completion of Lohengrin, the last of his old-style operas.  Originally planned as a stand-alone opera to be entitled Siegfried's Death, it ended by becoming the musical and dramatic capstone of the most extraordinary music drama ever created.

But the process of getting from poem to complete drama stretched over multiple decades.  Wagner kept finding that he needed more and more background information and back-story for his epic tale to make sense.  The ultimate change of title to focus on the ending of the gods' rule, simply reflected the fact that, in the end, he had composed something far greater than the story of a single hero.

Once the poem was written, stage by stage in backwards order, Wagner then composed the entire cycle in its proper order, beginning with Das Rheingold and ending with Götterdämmerung. Thus, you have the paradoxical experience of meeting an opera somewhat old-fashioned in structure and in the form of the storytelling, yet filled with the composer's ripest and most highly developed compositional technique.

Nowhere is that technique more on display than in the multiple passages for orchestra alone, in which some of the most important strands of the drama are conveyed through the most subtle interweaving of leitmotiven.  In addition to the preludes to the three acts, you also have the scene transition pieces, commonly called Siegfried's Rhine Journey and Siegfried's Funeral March.  The funeral march is a slow movement of towering intensity and power, combining multiple motifs from different aspects of Siegfried's life and welding them all together with a series of repeated pairs of chords played staccato.  At the centre of the march, those chords rise to a genuine tutta forza with few if any equals in all of music.  And the entire edifice is crowned with the majestic orchestral tone poem depicting the end of the story without words, a conclusion without precedent in the world of music drama.

From Brünnhilde's final words, "Siegfried! Your wife greets you!" the music then flows into the single grandest orchestral passage of the entire Ring: the epic postlude which depicts the flames mounting into the air and seizing upon Valhalla in a massive conflagration that ends the rule of the gods, while on earth the swelling waters of the Rhine cover the remains of the Gibichung hall, allowing the Rhinemaidens to restore the magic gold to its place and thus bring a new harmony to the world -- a world where the redeeming force of human love will henceforth govern life. All of this Wagner depicts in his most mature orchestration, drawing upon leitmotiven from all previous parts of the cycle to portray in music this epoch-ending and epoch-launching catastrophe.

For the audience, Götterdämmerung is the daunting finale of an epic experience. It lasts half an hour longer than Siegfried, and -- for all practical purposes -- twice the length of Das Rheingold. And yet, huge as it is, Götterdämmerung justifies every single second it takes to tell the final episodes of the story, and leaves us with a positive, hopeful ending -- not the negative one which the title seems to suggest.

Among the performers, Götterdämmerung is an epic test for the dramatic soprano fully on par with the tenor's testing role of Siegfried.  Not only does Brünnhilde remain on stage for the lion's share of the opera, but she gets to conclude the entire cycle with the famous "Immolation Scene," a dramatic soprano solo -- an aria, if you like -- which has no precedent in music.  It's not just the duration that makes the Immolation so intense (it lasts for fifteen nonstop minutes), but the way it requires the singer to plumb the depths and scale the heights of the widest vocal and emotional range, from low notes to stratospheric high notes and from the quietest, most inward and reflective singing to the last extrovert, fortissimo rendition of the character's famous Ho-jo-to-ho battle cry.

Christine Goerke definitely rose to the test.  Her passion in the opening morning-after scene with Siegfried came across as powerfully as her rage in the oath-taking, or her regret and sadder, wiser love in the Immolation.  Her finest moments of the evening came in the scene where Siegfried appears with Gutrune on his arm.  Here, voice and face alike projected the slow process of initial bewilderment changing by degrees into fury.  If Goerke's voice began to sound a little raw around the edges in the Immolation (and who could blame her), her acting lost nothing of its vital force in all the complex thoughts and feelings of that scene.  A magnificent portrayal.

Andreas Schager as Siegfried was fully her equal, not just in depicting the almost wilful blindness which leads him to his death, but also in the moments of puzzlement where the power of his love for Brünnhilde almost broke through the potion-induced haze of forgetfulness.  Excellent, too, was his singing in the scene with the Rhinemaidens.  My only qualm was the speed at which he delivered his quotations of the Woodbird's singing in Act 3.  In these moments, the performance became almost a race to the finish line and many of the intermediate notes in the rippling phrases of melody got lost in the rush.  However, the power of his voice was totally unimpaired at the death scene.

More remarkable was the power he displayed in the moments when he is disguised as Gunther by the Tarnhelm.  Schager effectively altered the tone of his voice, giving it a more baritonal quality, and still managed plenty of power in notes which are right at the lowest extreme of the tenor range.  It's the best singing I've ever heard from Siegfried in that challenging scene.

Evgeny Nikitin's performance played up the vanity of Gunther, making him a total fop and clearly showing how easily his vanity led him to be duped by Hagen.  In the end, when he got killed, I didn't feel remotely sorry for him.

This production highlights, as few others I've seen have done, the stern patriarchal nature of the society which reduces women like Gutrune to mere pawns in the schemes of men.  Edith Haller's strong voice and expressive face showed this manipulated status in spades, her singing and her facial expressions alike appearing on command, as it were.  The only time she came to life and seemed to feel anything for herself was when she expressed her affection towards Gunther or Siegfried.  In the final scene, when Gutrune both her brother and the man she thinks is her husband, I wept for her -- such was the depth of her sorrow.

Waltraute also plumbs the depths of sorrow in her monologue in Act 1.  Michaela Schuster gave an intensely gripping performance in her tale of how Wotan has surrendered to the inevitable and waits silently in Valhalla.  Schuster sang most of the monologue in a half-tone that compelled the audience to focus intensely on her words -- which still remained completely crisp and clear.  Never have I heard the monologue given such power, even when it's been sung much louder.  Impressive artistry.

Hagen, the villain of the piece, was sung by Eric Owens with the same level of demonic intensity which he brought to the role of Alberich in the 2010 "Live in HD" cinemacast.  Not so much crisp as biting, the ends of lines snapped off, this Hagen's singing was both powerful and to the point.  Especially true of Hagen's Watch, another scene where intensely quiet singing allied to sharp diction made my hair stand on end.  The only point where I couldn't quite hear him was his final line, "Zurück dem Ring" ("Get back from the Ring"), as he tried to seize the treasure from the joyful Rhinemaidens.  But let's face the fact, this is a total throwaway line, by any standard.  Indeed, I'm not sure why Wagner even bothered to leave it in.

Tomasz Konieczny treated us to more of the same sinister smile/grimace that marked his performance in Siegfried.  His appearance in a dream to Hagen had him being much more active than some Alberichs are allowed to be.

The opening night time scene with the three Norns or Fates was staged with ropes descending from all 24 planks of the machine.  The physical effort of handling and passing those ropes clearly counterpointed the slow, effortful singing of the three women.  The three contrasting voices were all powerful, well balanced, and clear in tone and diction.

It's impossible to forget the shocking moment when the planks, one by one, start revolving swiftly and uncontrollably, with the ropes dropping away one by one.  I had a split second to recall Erda's line from Siegfried about the world spinning out of control -- and here it was.  With all the units flip-flopping in conflicting directions, the poignancy of the line "Es riss!" ("It breaks!") was massively magnified.  Kudos to Ronnita Miller, Elizabeth Bishop, and Wendy Bryn Harmer for their gripping singing in this slow, yet magnetic, scene.

Act 3 brought the same trio of Rhinemaidens as in Das Rheingold.  Amanda Woodbury, Samantha Hankey, and Tamara Mumford carolled and cavorted even more joyously and playfully than in the earlier opera, running effortlessly up the waterfall projected on the machine only to shoot back down as if it were a playground slide.  More so than some Rhinemaidens, these three clearly changed the style of their singing when they began to warn Siegfried of his impending doom.  These Rhinemaidens pushed the characters close to the limits on both sides, serious and playful, with rewarding results.  Lovely work.

The Metropolitan Opera Chorus sang with power and clarity in the wedding scene, and in the hunting scene.  Would a little more acting and reacting be too much to ask?

Thanks to the numerous independent passages, the role of the orchestra becomes significant in Gotterdammerung beyond any of the earlier Ring operas.  With no audible glitches at all, the players covered themselves in glory in the opening introduction, Siegfried's Rhine Journey, Hagen's Watch, and other places.  The Funeral March was played with immense power, yet still not overdriven.  The final orchestral depiction of the closing stages of the drama towered to the skies before finishing with a tender, heartfelt account of the Redemption Through Love theme leading to the swelling final chords.

As throughout the entire cycle, conductor Philippe Jordan surpassed all expectations in delivering a near-perfectly paced and shaped account of a complex score, laden with traps for the unwary.  No question in my mind, this man is an opera conductor to be reckoned with.  It's no surprise that he's been chosen as the next music director of the Vienna State Opera.  His contribution to this Ring was critical (for the obvious reasons) but also artistically significant in finding and nurturing the overall teamwork of the entire company.

In assessing the total performance of the cycle, I have to say that any criticisms I've made are in the nature of quibbles between 95% and 99%.  For the most part, it's been a 99% artistic success.

Just sign me, "Satisfied Beyond Belief."

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To conclude, I would like to share some final important thoughts about the entire experience of witnessing Der Ring des Nibelungen in a week-long sequence of live performances, as the composer intended.

No recorded performance, even one recorded live in front of an audience, can ever equal the experience of attending a live performance of the Ring yourself.

There are three simple but very important reasons why this is so. First, because there are so many key musical moments which push the live audience to greater concentration (in quiet music) or give the audience greater immersion and a physical sense of presence (in louder music) in a way that no playback technology, no matter how good, can equal.

Second, and strongly related to the first, is that the audience becomes caught up in the experience and shares those moments of concentration and immersion as a single unit. In an opera house the size of the Metropolitan (nearly 4000 seats) the power and intensity of that sharing is both immense and palpable.

Indeed, the sharing led to the formation of numerous friendships along and across the rows of the auditorium.  In my row, we had a couple from Washington DC on one side, and a couple from Melbourne, Australia on the other side with me in the middle.  We shared some fascinating reactions to what we were witnessing, as well as more general conversation about other musical and operatic interests and performances.  All of us agreed that it was, by any measure, a memorable and rewarding experience.

The third reason is the cumulative power of witnessing all four chapters of this drama in such a close, tightly-integrated schedule. In this respect, I think the people who bought the cycle with four consecutive Saturday matinees missed out on a valuable part of the Ring experience -- the sense that it is, by intention and in actuality, a single drama. Even after a night off in between, I arrived at the theatre for Siegfried acutely aware of the events depicted in Die Walküre, and similarly came to Götterdämmerung with an intense feeling of continuing connection from the critical turning points in Siegfried. This building of connections in our experience of the drama will always tend to elude home listeners, I think.

When I wrote my preface before Das Rheingold, I said that I felt this was likely to be my first and last-ever complete Ring. Now, after the week is done, I'm more of a mind to ponder where and when I should take in my next one. The endless miracle of live music drama strikes again.

The Ring at the Met # 4: The Joyful Victory of "Siegfried"

Okay, before we get down to business, let's see if anyone remembers this line:  "He's very young, and he's very handsome, and he's very strong, and he's very brave, and he's very stupid."  I'm sure my friends, who know my lifelong love for the wickedly on-target musical satires of Anna Russell, were probably wondering when her (in)famous take on Wagner's Ring would make an appearance.

This is definitely the time, because -- notwithstanding Russell's heavy dose of sarcasm -- the hero of the third opera in the tetralogy, Siegfried, really is all of those things (although in fairness, "naïve" is a better descriptor than "stupid").  And it's these precise qualities that do so much to lighten the atmosphere and the mood of Siegfried, especially when viewed in opposition to the doom and gloom surrounding so much of the total story of the Ring.

It's ironic that Siegfried is, in many places, absolutely a comic opera (chuckles were erupting all over the house at regular intervals), and yet it's dominated until the last scene by low voices and features some of the darkest orchestral textures Wagner ever composed -- heavy reliance on the lower instruments of the orchestra, with especially dark sonorities for the famous forging scene, and most of all for Fafner's cavern.

It's even more ironic that, perhaps because of the comic elements, Wagner felt sure that Siegfried would be the most popular of the four Ring operas.  Ummm -- not.  Thanks to the handy little tally that the Met always displays in the house programme, I now know that I witnessed the 541st performance of Die Walküre in Metropolitan Opera history, versus the 273rd performance of Siegfried.  

Buoyancy and optimism are as essential to the singer as they are to the character, because the role of Siegfried is -- beyond question -- the heftiest challenge any composer has ever handed to a dramatic tenor.  Indeed, the common use of the German term heldentenor ("heroic tenor") to describe this type of voice can be traced back to Siegfried more than any other opera.  A complete performance of the title role in Siegfried is like a pentathlon for the vocal cords and diaphragm muscles.  A singer who approaches this challenge unprepared, or in a worried or otherwise pessimistic mood, will get eaten alive by the music.

On the dramatic side, the biggest challenge of the lead role is age.  That's because it takes years for a singer's voice to grow and settle to the point where tackling this role even becomes an option -- and not a few singers' careers have come to a crashing halt in part because they took on Siegfried and other heldentenor roles before their voices were actually ready.  So, with the ideal heldentenor approaching age forty, you then have the problem of making him appear and act on stage as not just a much younger man, but actually a teenager!  It doesn't help any that so many singers of the heldentenor type run to weight (including both Siegfrieds that I've seen in previous live performances).

For the producing opera house, there's the necessity (and it is absolutely that) of booking one of the few available heldentenors several years in advance, and then crossing your fingers and hoping like mad that nothing goes wrong.  Accidents, illnesses, career-ending injuries -- even a common cold can threaten a long-planned staging of this opera.  The first time this Metropolitan Opera production was mounted, the scheduled tenor did become ill and the Met had to find a replacement Siegfried on very short notice of less than a week.  They did find him, in the person of Jay Hunter Morris -- and saving the Metropolitan Opera's bacon like that is a definite launching-pad experience for any singer's later career!

So let's start on the actual performance right there.  I've seen the 2011 staging of the same production in the Cineplex and on video, and there's far more stage business in the show now than there was in that previous take.  I'd be willing to bet that much of it went by the board in 2011 simply because Morris had so little time to settle into the role, adjust to his colleagues, and get the feel of the stage before having to get out there and give it a go.

No such problems this year, and Andreas Schager convincingly turned the clock back to present a firebrand of teenaged temperament, running the gamut in seconds from mercurial high spirits to brooding introspection.  At times, his vocal explosions became a shade too explosive for my liking, although well within acceptable limits.  At several points in his arguments with Mime, the tone became harsh under pressure as he let his anger at the dwarf rip.  On the other hand, his voice became positively silky in his quieter singing, creating beautiful tone apparently without effort when wondering about his mother or during the forest murmurs scene.  His powerhouse performance soared to great heights in the final love duet, and he hit the finish line of the marathon without any apparent sense of strain to be heard.  Dramatically, too, Schager projected all the aspects of the character with both conviction and a strong sense of having fun -- which let us enjoy the fun in the work as well.

The entire first act stands or falls by the partnership between Siegfried and Mime.  The role of Mime presents its own challenges, demanding a nimble, flexible voice, rapid-fire articulation, and the ability to project multiple aspects of a sweetly manipulative yet unimaginative schemer.  No getting around it, Mime is not nice -- but the audience still has to care a bit about him if the whole of Act 1 isn't going to land with the dull thud of a flop.

In this performance, Gerhard Siegel absolutely hit the sweet spot on all of those requirements.  His voice definitely fit the bill, and his shambling physicality, endless hand-wringing, and vividly expressive face telegraphed every inch of his schemes -- and his corresponding doubts and fears.  For me, the key point was that he actually convinced me to buy into his stupidity in the riddle scene with the Wanderer (Wotan).

All the qualities that distinguished Michael Volle's performance as Wotan in Das Rheingold and Die Walküre continued into Siegfried.  Volle clearly showed us the paradoxical nature of the god's thoughts at this point.  At one moment he accepts with resignation and even with relief the impending end of his rule, and at the next rails against his fate and struggles to avert it.  While this paradox appears openly in the first two scenes of Act 3, it was both implied and -- even more -- heard in Volle's acting and singing at many points in the first two acts.

Also present was a cruel streak in the character (an aspect I don't recall encountering before) in the concluding moments of the riddle scene.  This sense of cruelty added another dimension to the Wanderer's personality, and made him seem more human as he struggled in an all-too-human way with his dilemma.  Notable, too, was the depth of his dejection after the moment when Siegfried shatters the divine spear.  In face and voice, Volle showed us that in truth the sword broke him too, and thus he created a heart-rending sensation of loss.

Tomasz Konieczny sang as clearly and as flexibly as before in the role of Alberich.  Both musically and dramatically he deployed the mixture of fear and excitement with which he greeted the rousing of Fafner.

One of the intriguing directorial decisions in this production is the concept of having the dragon turn back into Fafner-as-giant after Siegfried stabs him through the heart.  This was handled convincingly and gave Dmitry Belosselskiy another chance to appear physically as well as singing -- since the voice of Fafner-as-dragon is done from offstage with amplification.  In every way, he achieved his finest moment of the cycle in this death scene, infusing his singing with an underlying sense of regret as if he himself now understood the enormity of how and where his life had gone off the rails.

Soprano Erin Morley did lovely work in the Woodbird's melismatic carolling.  Also important in this forest scene was the virtuoso playing of Erik Ralske in the critical onstage horn solos.

For me, the acid test of orchestra and conductor in the entire cycle is the performance of the prelude to Act 3 of Siegfried.  This complex interweaving of motifs accurately depicts in music the storm and stress in Wotan's heart as he confronts his fate, and it's important to keep the interwoven textures clear.  With a tempo slower than one commonly encounters, Philippe Jordan and the orchestra totally hit the target zone with as clear a performance as I've ever heard, one that lacked nothing in force and fury yet still kept all the strands of the musical argument distinct.  It rose to the most thunderous of all thunder rolls -- I could feel the air quivering around me.

The ensuing mountain scene with Erda crackled with dramatic tension of another sort.  Where she remains partially imprisoned in the earth in Das Rheingold, Erda here ascends out of her fastness and moves about the stage.  This allows her more freedom to explore and express her own fear and bewilderment as the world spins out of control around her.  The Wanderer in this scene actually seizes her a couple of times, a move that's dramatically effective to say the least.

I'm less certain about her costume.  A plain black robe in the first opera here becomes a robe covered with faceted black mirrors, which sets the reflected rays of stage light darting restlessly all over the auditorium.  This is a rare miscalculation in the costume department, appearing at once garish and just plain tacky -- not to mention becoming a scene-stealing nuisance.  It reminded me of Liberace's suits covered with sequins -- no lie.

Karen Cargill gave an impressive performance as the Primeval Mother Goddess here, the voice both powerful and assured with little sign of the broad vibrato that I heard on the first night.

And so, finally, we come in the very last scene to the wakening of Brünnhilde.  Needless to say, everyone is waiting for the last and greatest laugh of the entire show -- the moment when Siegfried removes her helmet, then starts backwards and exclaims, "Das ist kein Mann!" ("That is no man!").  Or, as Anna Russell so succinctly put it, "He's never seen a woman before -- so he doesn't know what she is -- but he soon finds out."

Christine Goerke gave another rich, assured performance as Brünnhilde in this final scene, right from her opening invocation to the sun.  As with her father at the beginning of the act, Brünnhilde also has to struggle with the loss of her divine power and inviolability.  Goerke gave a magnificent account of the fears that trouble the character as she confronts her inevitable diminution.  But she allied that fear with the new nobility that human Brünnhilde will bring to the task of setting the world right, a task already foretold for her in the Erda scene.  Vocally, she became the equal of Andreas Schager in the final ecstatic moments of their love duet, ending with a rock-steady final high note.

With this team, Siegfried received an impressive performance, building on the strengths we already discovered in the first two operas and adding new strengths in several key areas.  Another magnificent evening of music drama at the highest level of quality.

The Ring at the Met # 3: "Die Walküre" Takes Wing

Second night, second instalment of Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen, second night in a row officially mind blown.

If Das Rheingold demands the utmost in scenic effects, then Die Walküre places far more severe tests upon the singers.  Lengthy phrases and musical periods, scenes built over a long time span with a great deal of narration but little or no dramatic action, inward thought replacing outward activity -- all of these things call for a heightened degree of concentration from the artists.  

Not only that, but the role of Wotan is both lengthy and intense, while Brünnhilde's part calls for a great deal of singing in an uncomfortably low part of the vocal range.

And make no mistake, Die Walküre does present several interesting challenges to the scenic designer as well -- particularly in Act III which begins with flying horses and ends with fire spreading all around the central point of the stage.

And yet, Die Walküre remains the most popular and most often staged of all the Ring operas.  As well, the first act is often performed alone in concert -- an easy task since it requires only three singers.  In large measure, this popularity is due to the focus of this drama on human love.  The passion of Siegmund and Sieglinde is the obvious example, but not the only one.  Even the disobedience of Brünnhilde and the horrible dilemma of Wotan are fueled in large measure by the conflict between duty or necessity on the one hand and love on the other.  So Die Walküre presents us with situations and emotions to which we all can relate.

If the performance of Das Rheingold was impressive and involving, this Metropolitan Opera production of Die Walküre soared to a point as near perfection as I could ever hope or expect to see.  And I say that as one who has experienced five previous performances, two live and three on video.  Unlike any of those previous experiences, this performance held my attention for every minute of the evening, and I never once "disconnected" from either music or performance.

The Wotan of Michael Volle was outstanding at every point.  Some viewers might carp at this or that interpretive nuance, but the power and unity of his conception was undeniable.  Volle is an outstanding actor and singer alike and it definitely showed in this performance.  I've never seen anyone deliver the lengthy monologue in Act 2 with such a strong sense of direction and line, every twist and turn of the music presented like a signpost on a voyage whose destination is clearly known in advance.  At the end of the battle scene, the emotion racking him was palpable and heart-rending.  In the Act 3 confrontation with Brünnhilde, Volle gave us towering rage without obscuring or losing a single note of the music.  And in the final moments, Volle summoned all the joys and sorrows of the world in his farewell to Brünnhilde.  A performance of awe-inspiring quality.

The Brünnhilde of Christine Goerke was fully a match for this Wotan.  Can any composer have ever laid a bigger challenge on a singer than Wagner, by forcing Brünnhilde to start off -- cold -- with the infamous "Ho-jo-to-ho" battle cry?  Goerke nailed the high note with little apparent effort and a few minutes later, at the end of the scene, negotiated the octave leaps up and down without any hint of a slide whatsoever.  In between, her pert, sassy manner told us in no uncertain terms who she was.   It matters, because Brünnhilde has to take the most momentous journey of any of the characters in the Ring -- and her journey is diminished if she at first appears as if working hard to nail the notes.  

But Goerke kept going, from strength to strength -- from attentive, involved listening during the monologue to her transformation from cold warrior maiden to exalted ally in her scene with Siegmund.  In the third act, she took us through another memorable stage of her life, from the terrified yet defiant opening scene of the act to the heart-tugging joy as Wotan takes leave of her.  Throughout the evening, she sang with power and finesse beautifully allied to clear tone even in the lowest parts of the range and with magnificent diction.

Stuart Skelton created an imposing, heroic, yet also vulnerable Siegmund.  More than of the other Siegmunds in my experience, he welded the entire first act into a single, spellbinding arc tracing the discovery of love.  The famous solo, Winterstürme wichen dem Wonnemond, so often a highlight of the role, here became just one more element in a coherent whole.  The vulnerability showed clearly in Act 2 when he resolved to kill himself and Sieglinde, rather than be parted from her.

The power of Skelton's voice totally met its match in the Sieglinde of Eva-Maria Westbroek.  In comparison with her performance on the 2011 DVD, Westbroek has developed both more power and more subtlety in the voice, allied with a more natural, believable, indeed gripping dramatic interpretation.  Although her love rapture soared in the closing minutes of Act 1, I felt her finest moment came with her utter dejection in the opening of Act 3.  Here the formerly brilliant vocal tone developed a leaden, grey hue so heavy as to sound like a completely different singer.

As her husband, Hunding, Günther Groissböck exemplified brutality masquerading as masculinity, and threats disguised as good manners.  If a singer's voice can be said to sound like 20 degrees below freezing, then Groissböck definitely achieved that temperature from his first entry.  The various moments of crisp diction in the role were not so much cut off as bitten off.  It's just unfortunate that his death scene looked like a wooden soldier knocked over.

Jamie Barton dominated the stage and Wotan in her scene as Fricka.  Unlike her Fricka the previous evening, her voice came searing through even the heaviest orchestral writing.  I'm sure that her powerful singing raised blisters on Wotan's skin.  It's quite the outburst of bad temper, or -- as Maureen Forrester called it after performing the role -- "a torrent of bitchiness."  Yet, Barton contrived to keep her flare-ups entirely musical while still maintaining dramatic believability.

For many audience members, the ultimate highlight of Die Walküre comes at the opening of Act 3, the famous Ride of the Valkyries.  The Valkyries really do ride through the clouds in this staging -- seated on the crest of the machine, holding reins, as the individual "planks" seesaw up and down.  It's a great visual complement to the rousing music -- and the playfulness of the warrior maidens is equally on show as they wave to each other and then, in ones and twos, slide down the planks to land triumphantly on the forestage.

The singing?  Oh, yes, they do sing while going through all of that activity, don't they?  This production has assembled a well-balanced team of eight voices and ensured that they match each other in weight throughout the scene.  It's hard to get eight solo opera singers to function as a chorus, yet this is in effect what the Valkyries have to do in their numerous ensemble passages.  The team more than met both the dramatic and the musical demands of one of Wagner's most complicated scenes.  Kudos to them all: Kelly Cae Hogan (Gerhilde), Jessica Faselt (Helmwige), Renée Tatum (Waltraute), Daryl Freedman (Schwertleite), Wendy Bryn Harmer (Ortlinde), Eve Gigliotti (Siegrune), Maya Lahyani (Grimgerde), and Mary Phillips (Rossweise).

Under the secure direction of Philippe Jordan, the orchestra played with even more finesse than on the first night, the sound well-nigh perfectly balanced at all times.  Not the least of the success of this stunning performance was Maestro Jordan's selection of tempo, sometimes a little faster than other interpreters, but neither dragging nor racing at any point.  Once, just once, I'd like to hear the final beautiful notes of this opera in a live performance (or on a live-performance DVD) but once again I was frustrated as the applause and cheers erupted about six beats from the end.  Sigh.  Verdammte opera lovers!!!!

This remount of the production has solved and improved a number of awkward moments in the original staging, making better use of space and time to clarify the relationships.  One notable change is the first entrance of Brünnhilde, a moment which brought Deborah Voigt to grief back in 2011.  But the most effective improvement came in the beginning's of Wotan's farewell to Brünnhilde.  Now the two can clearly be seen yearning for each other, but taking it in turns for each to look towards the other for a sign of reconciliation.  And then, just as the orchestra reaches the last and greatest wave of sound, she rushes into her father's embrace -- and the heart-tugging effect is amplified because it's been so thoroughly prepared.

To witness such a coherent, strongly cast, finely executed Die Walküre was a real privilege, and I'm sure many of the assembled audience felt that as well.  This performance alone would have justified the trip to New York, but there are still two more magnificent evenings to come.  Frankly, though, I'm quite happy to have a night off tonight for a leisurely dinner and early-to-bed.  Live Wagner performances at this level of quality and sophistication aren't only tiring for the performers!