Reviews 2009
Reviews 2009
✭✭✭✩✩
by Giacomo Puccini, directed by Maer Gronsdal Powell
Canadian Opera Company, Four Seasons Centre, Toronto
April 17-May 24, 2009
The COC’s current production of La Bohème serves a fine showcase for Canadian talent. In the COC’s last staging in 2005, three of the six leading roles were sung by Canadians. Now the number has risen to five. While overall the present production is musically and dramatically superior to the 2005 production, it is still not as good as it could be.
The primary advantage of the present Bohème is that the cast is actually about the same age as the youthful characters they depict. In internationally-cast all-star Bohèmes, the singers may have stronger voices but they seldom look like starving young Parisian artists and rarely act as an ensemble. Here with David Pomeroy as the poet Rodolfo, Peter McGillivray as the musician Schaunard and especially Peter Barrett as Marcello the painter and Robert Gleadow as Colline the philosopher, we finally have the feeling of a community of creative people who have lived and suffered together but still have a sense of humour about their misfortunes. Establishing this feeling is crucial to explaining how the poor seamstress Mimì (Frédérique Vézina) is so easily welcomed into their group.
Director Maer Gronsdal Powell takes full advantage of the youth and daring of her cast by giving them highly detailed actions to perform while singing including some surprisingly rough slapstick. Indeed, she is so concerned with having actors in continuous motion that in the Café Momus scene she introduces two street performers whose antics constantly distract us from the main characters. In the main roles Barrett, Gleadow, Vézina and New Zealander Anna Leese as Musetta seem most at home on stage. Commanding a lovely rich soprano, Vézina is a particularly heartbreaking Mimì, who, for a change, actually seems deathly ill when we first meet her. In acting Pomeroy is too cold as Mimì's lover, his stiff manner a contrast to the others’ lively animation. In singing, too, he can produce great ringing notes but can’t quite disguise the effort that goes into them.
Bulgarian conductor Julian Kovatchev frequently gives in to the temptation to slow down the tempo for the opera’s most famous arias in order to wring them of as much sentiment as possible. He takes Musetta’s famous Act II waltz at such a lugubrious pace it seems more like a dirge. The late Wolfram Skalicki’s heavy, realistic sets have served the COC well for the past 20 years, but they require three intermissions to change over so that you feel you spend nearly as much time waiting in the lobby as you do watching the opera. This may be great for bar sales but it inhibits full involvement with the story.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: A version of this review appeared in Eye Weekly 2009-04-22.
Photo: David Pomeroy, Frédérique Vézina, Robert Gleadow, Peter McGillivray and Peter Barrett. ©Michael Cooper.
2009-04-22
La Bohème