Reviews 2011
Reviews 2011
✭✭✭✭✩
by Ana Sokolovic, directed by Michael Cavanagh
Queen of Puddings, Berkeley Street Theatre Downstairs, Toronto
June 24-July 2, 2011
First thoughts: With Svadba - Wedding, Queen of Puddings Music Theatre has created a beautiful work of music theatre where music, movement, acting and design combine to generate an invigorating theatrical experience. Montreal composer Ana Sokolovic has assembled traditional wedding texts from her native Serbia to fashion a one-hour a cappella piece that goes to the heart of what a wedding means for the bride and her friends. Here five friends (Laura Albino, Carla Huhtanen, Andrea Ludwig, Shannon Mercer and Krisztina Szabó) entertain and comfort Milica (Jacqueline Woodley) on the night before her wedding. In an exquisitely staged scene they bathe her as she symbolically washes away her old life for the new. The often hilarious antics of the first scenes gives way to melancholy and resignation as Milica focusses on her beloved and the five friends reconcile themselves to her departure.
Sokolovic’s music is unfailingly inventive, recalling the kind of folk music made popular by Le Mystère des Voix bulgares but playfully refracted through the influence of composers like Stravinsky, Berio and Ligeti. These are six new-style opera singers adept not just in singing beautifully but also in executing tightly choreographed movements and in playing various instruments like rainsticks and ocarinas. Director Michael Cavanagh and designer Michael Gianfrancesco eschew any sort of folkloric approach to the piece. Instead, they universalize the action as a rite of passage from girlhood to adulthood both for the bride and her friends. The high level of imagination of the music, design and staging should make this a piece to appeal not just to new music enthusiasts but to those interested in the possibilities of theatre in general.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: A full review of Svadba - Wedding will appear in the online edition of Opera News this September.
Photo: Jacqueline Woodley. ©2011 John Lauener.
For Tickets, visit www.canadianstage.com/alsoatberkeley.
2011-06-25
Svadba - Wedding