Uncivilized is a play by Ahmad Meree dealing with “belonging” in its broadest sense. Meree plays Mohammad who takes us on a journey from arriving as a refugee from war torn Syria to, eventually, becoming a Canadian citizen. But how Canadian can he become? He can vote and get a Canadian passport but he’s still “brown” and Muslim. Throughout the process he’s continually asked if he’s a terrorist. It’s quite cutting but also very funny.
Out of Dawn’s Mind is a setting, by Edmund Finnis, of five poems by Alice Oswald. It’s scored for soprano (here Ruby Hughes) and string orchestra (here the 17 strong The Manchester Collective; dir: Rakhi Singh). The poems deal with light, water, time and the experience of coming into contact with the world. The feeling is intimate and meditative. The vocal line is high but quite relaxed in tempo. The accompaniment is elegiac with brooding and shimmering patches. It’s rather beautiful but not at all dramatic.
Offenbach’s 1867 opéra bouffe, La Grande-Duchesse de Gérolstein, seems quite conventional after his forays into satirising the classics. It’s basically a love triangle set in a fictional Central European statelet wrapped in a send-up of militarism. Rather typical operetta fare really. That said it’s a perfectly acceptable example of the genre, if scarcely innovative.
This year’s Fall presentation from Opera Atelier is Charpentier’s The Descent of Orpheus. It’s a rarely seen work but, oddly enough, this will be the second time it’s appeared at Koerner Hall this year since it featured on the opening night of Toronto Summer Music. On Thursday in the RBA we got some insights into how Opera Atelier will present the piece.
The COC’s revival of Cosi fan tutte is still a visual feast and a few deft updates and some terrific singing make it worth seeing, even for the third time! My full review is now available at bachtrack.com
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Steve Reich turned 90 on Saturday and on Tuesday evening Soundstreams staged a celebratory concert at Koerner Hall. It began with an unusual performance of Clapping Music. Steve Reich had been filmed in New York playing one part. That was screened while Russell Hartenberger played the other part live on stage. It was simple, effective and very apt.
I sat down with mezzo-soprano Ema Nikolovska this morning to talk about her upcoming show at Koerner Hall with guitarist Sean Shibe. It’s a touring show that’s being seen in multiple cities across Europe and North America and Ema was very clear that she sees it as an “experience” and “not a song recital”. So let’s take a step back and look at how it came into existence and then evolved into what we will be able to experience later this month.
Friday lunchtime saw the annual appearance of the UoT Opera programme in the RBA lunchtime series. All the Master’s and PG Diploma students were on display for a series of semi-staged excerpts from Mozart operas directed by Mabel Wonnacott and her students.
Rohinton Mistry’s novel A Fine Balance is a complex, six hundred page long saga about events during the 1975-77 State of Emergency in India. Turning it into a coherent, stageable play is a considerable feat and Anosh Irani has managed that; even if the result is a long evening at the theatre. It’s actually pretty clever. Besides the ruthless elimination of minor characters and sub-plots he handles the principal characters’ back stories by dropping in bits of information all through the narrative that allow the audience to fill in details that are otherwise not made explicit. It’s efficient and effective.
So the story is condensed down to Dina (Zorana Sadiq), a widow, trying to get by by starting a garment sub-contracting business. She hires two tailors; Ishvar (Anand Rajaram) and his nephew Om (Ben Yoganathan), and they together with her PG, Maneck (Siddharth Sharma); the student son of an old friend, carry the plot supported by Husein Mdhavji and Sugoth Varughese playing multiple roles. It’s only as the play proceeds that we learn that Dina is Parsi and the tailors are Scheduled Caste/Dalit. Which is pretty important. There are all sorts of nuances of caste and creed at play here.
Continue reading“Pleasure and pain are impossible to separate” is the tag line for Bootycandy by John O’Hara. It’s a play about Black/Queer identity and it’s currently playing at Buddies in Bad Times in a co-production with Obsidian Theatre. It’s complex, episodic, impressionistic, very funny and quite filthy. The notes by director Jay Northcott can basically be summarised as “Go with the flow and be open to what’s happening around you”. It’s great advice. Trying to find a linear narrative or “meaning” in Bootycandy is just a recipe for frustration.
