Reviews 2011
Reviews 2011
✭✭✭✩✩
by Gioacchino Rossini, directed by Joan Font
Canadian Opera Company, Four Seasons Centre, Toronto
April 23-May 25, 2011
The show calling itself Cinderella playing at the Four Seasons Centre is not the ballet by James Kudelka for the National Ballet nor is it one of Ross Petty’s pantos. Rather it is Gioacchino Rossini’s 1817 opera known the world over as La Cenerentola. It is a three-hour long opera in Italian with English surtitles. Only bring children with you if you think they can handle that. Otherwise, don’t let the English title or the Barbie doll in advertisements make you think this is a show for kids.
In Rossini’s version of the Cinderella story, there are matching bracelets instead of a glass slipper and a wise man trying to educate a prince instead of a fairy godmother. Rossini’s rationalist view makes the story about seeing beyond rank and class and having the courage to rise above anger to forgive one’s tormentors. There is no magic except what comes from the music. Here the production is blessed with a superb cast. In the title role Elizabeth DeShong is outstanding. She wins our sympathy and fires off the incredible vocal fireworks Rossini demands with perfect ease. As Don Ramiro (the Prince Charming equivalent), Lawrence Brownlee is simply amazing. Here is an ideal Rossini tenor with an agile voice, breath-taking precision in the music’s leaps and runs, ringing high notes and a winning stage presence. As Dandini, who drolly impersonates Ramiro to test Cinders’ father and sisters, Brett Polegato revels in the chance to play comedy for a change and recalibrates his vocal production from the heft needed for romantic roles to the nimbleness needed for humour. With such marvellous singing it is a great pity that the orchestra under conductor Leonardo Vordoni repeatedly drowns it out.
While it might be best to approach Rossini’s opera on its own terms, designer and cartoonist Joan Guillén tries to Disneyfy it as much as possible. Not only is the colour scheme of bright, saturated pastels right out of the 1950 Disney film, but he gives Cinders six mouse companions who look just like the characters in Mad magazine’s Spy vs. Spy. This could be fun, but director Joan Font’s direction is decidedly unimaginative. He moves the singers about in standard opera formations, can’t think of anything interesting for the mice to do and creates a disappointing transformation scene before the ball. Worst of all, he decides to give the story a twist at the end that turns all the action into merely Cinders’ dream--a move to please no one, especially children.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: A version of this review appeared in Eye Weekly 2011-04-25.
Photo: Ileana Montalbetti as Clorinda, Elizabeth DeShong as Cenerentola and Rihab Chaieb as Tisbe. ©Michael Cooper.
2011-04-25
La Cenerentola