✭✭✩✩✩

music by Louis Dufort, libretto by Tom Walmsley, directed by Heidi Strauss & Alex Fallis

Good Hair Day Productions, Theatre Passe Muraille Backspace, Toronto

September 14-23, 2012

“... And So Are We”

You know something’s not right with an opera when the show improves every time the singers leave the stage.  Yet, that is the effect of Louis Dufort’s new opera Julie Sits Waiting written to a libretto by Tom Walmsley.  Teresa Przybylski’s set of taut wires and threatening jagged shards, Rebecca Picherack’s exciting extremes of lighting and especially Jeremy Mimnagh’s swirling video projections are all in greater concord with Dufort’s avant garde electronic score than is Walmsley’s hokey melodramatic plot and the sketched-in characters he has created. 

The 67-minute-long opera concerns Julie (Fides Krucker), who has met Mick (Richard Armstrong) over the internet and has arranged a few hours of “dirty sex” (their description) while Julie’s husband Rick, a policeman, is marching in a parade.  All we know of Julie is that she is happily married and has a daughter she loves.  Why she has the need to have “dirty sex” with a stranger is one of many things that Walmsley does not explain.  Mick, however, is a former Anglican priest, and his interlude of “dirty sex” is simultaneously a form of defiance against his former profession and a way of degrading himself.

Abstracted from the plot, Mimnagh’s vivid images of stars and galaxies forming in outer space are quite beautiful.  In context, however, where it coincides with the couple’s lovemaking, it seems like a corny trip back to the 1960s where sex was equated with oneness with the universe.  Here not only does the earth move, but stars are born.  The two return and sing of the ecstasy they both felt and how each would have been happy to have been killed by the other. 

For Walmsley, not just here but in his plays like Something Red (1978) and Blood (1995), sex and violence are pretty much the same thing.  The difficulty is that Walmsley does not explore the theme in the opera but merely has the characters assert it over and over: “it’s all sweat and flesh ... it’s violence and death ... it’s love at first sight”.  We might understand this morbidity in the ex-priest but not at all in Julie.  Inevitably, the couple come down from their adrenalin high and start to wallow in guilt.  Dufort nearly foregoes setting Walmsley’s text for Mick and has it delivered as a kind of tuned speech preceded, rather bizarrely, with Mick making a variety of animal noises.  In his non est mea culpa speech-aria, Mick affirms both that there is no God and that since he’s going to hell anyway it doesn’t matter what he does.  Obviously, Mick is not very adept at theology because if there is no God why would there be a hell where He would punish sinners?     

After another interlude in which Mimnagh portrays what seem to be MRI scans of the human head, we discover that Mick has murdered Rick and struck Julie on the head to exculpate her from Rick’s murder.  The only problem with this is that Walmsley gives Mick no motivation to do such a thing.  Rick did not come home to discover them at it.  They spent the time after separately trying to blame and justify themselves.  The couple’s one-afternoon stand hardly makes them like Zola’s Thérèse Raquin and Laurent, whose long-term affair is threatened by the increasing presence of Thérèse’s husband Camille.

No matter the reason, Walmsley’s tawdry adultery plot with all his characters’ talk of God and claims that the devil made them do it and turned them into animals simply reeks of the 19th century.  That’s why it clashes so much with Dufort’s electronic setting.  The words and music seem to exist in entirely different worlds, with the design relating more to the nature of the music than to the outdated plot.

Dufort’s music consists of blocks of sound each focussing of a different timbre.  The opera begins with a dizzying variety of horn fanfares and abruptly shifts rather than segues into sections focussing on string sounds, recorder sounds and, most beautifully, on zither sounds.  I would have to see the opera again to note whether these various blocks of sound relate in any way to the topics the characters discuss, but my first impression was that they did not.  Dufort’s music seems mostly to supply a background against which Walmsley’s text occurs rather than a medium that interacts with it.  In fact, Dufort’s electronic manipulation of the singers’ voices – changing the pitch of Mick’s words or allowing Julie to sing to echoes of her own voice – suggests that he is more interested in having voices fit into his soundworld than in reflecting the content of what they say.  The least attractive aspect of Dufort’s music are the frequent passages of pure noise, rather like someone stomping on endless bags of potato chips, that punctuate the more delicate sections of the score.  Dufort has written music for ballets for Marie Chouinard and one work L’Archange (2005) called an “opér’installation”.  Since his music seems to respond so little to the dynamics of the plot, Julie Sits Waiting might be more successful as another “opér’installation” where the story involves a static situation.   

Given the difficulties they face, Krucker and Armstrong give superb performances.  Krucker’s pure tone and strength in her highest notes is a pleasure and Armstrong shows he is perfectly capable of radically altering the production of his massive baritone voice without electronic help.  Since Walmsley has made their motivation and worldview unclear to the point of self-contradiction, it is a pity we feel absolutely nothing for either character despite the vocal prowess that both singers display.  In the absence of initiatives from Toronto’s largest opera company, it is great that Toronto has small independent companies like GHDP to commission new Canadian operas.  While not every commission will be a success, the fact that there is still a will to create new work out there should give us hope for the future. 

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.

Photo: Richard Armstrong and Fides Krucker. ©2012 Jeremy Mimnagh.

For tickets, visit www.artsboxoffice.ca.