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by Veda Hille & Amiel Gladstone, directed by Amiel Gladstone

The Musical Stage Company with the NAC, Berkeley Street Theatre Downstairs, Toronto

May 17-June 4, 2017;

NAC, Ottawa

September 13-30, 2017

Onegin: “Ghost upon ghost upon ghost”

It’s a fairly odd idea for a creative team to turn a work that has become firmly entrenched in the international repertory as an opera into a musical especially if the team has nothing new to say about the subject matter.  Jonathan Larson’s Rent (1996) is based on Giacomo Puccini’s La Bohème (1896), but Larson’s musical succeeds because he transfers the subject matter to a different time, place and circumstances which both justify a new musical language and show how the subject matter is still relevant.  In contrast, Elton John’s Aida (1998) was a failure because it had nothing new to say about its subject and merely made what was sublime in Verdi’s 1871 opera cartoonish and clichéd. 

Veda Hille & Amiel Gladstone’s Onegin (2016), now having its Toronto premiere, falls somewhere in between Larson’s Rent and John’s Aida.  The programme claims that Onegin is based on both Alexander Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin, an 1833 novel in verse, and on Tchaikovsky’s 1879 opera of the same name.  In fact, excluding its unnecessary prologue, Onegin follows Tchaikovsky’s own libretto almost scene for scene, merely substituting indie folk and rock songs for the classical arias in the original.  Hille and Gladstone do not transfer the subject matter to a different place, time and circumstances and thus appear to have nothing new to say about it to justify the updated musical language.  In fact, the duo appear to have less to say about the subject matter than did either Tchaikovsky or Pushkin.

As in its sources, Onegin (pronounced “ah-NYEG-in” as in Russian) concerns the jaded aristocrat Evgeni Onegin (Daren A. Herbert), who has just inherited a country estate from his uncle.  Onegin’s best friend Vladimir Lensky (Josh Epstein) is engaged to Olga Larin (Elena Juatco), who lives at the adjacent estate with her mother (Rebecca Auerbach) and older sister Tatyana (Hailey Gillis).  When Lensky brings Onegin over to meet his future wife, Tatyana falls in love at first sight with Onegin.  The girl, whose ideas of love are based solely on the novels she had read, believes that Onegin is the “one” and writes him a letter confessing her love.  In response, Onegin coldly dismisses her love as the product of childish fantasy and with no awareness of how profoundly his manner wounds her.  At a dance at the Larin estate, Onegin avoids Tatyana and amuses himself by flirting with Olga.  This leads the drunken Lensky to challenge Onegin to a duel with tragic consequences.                             

                    

Gladstone and Hille have already made their task difficult by not relocating the action to a different time and place causing comparisons between their musical and Tchaikovsky’s opera to be inevitable and not to work in their favour.  Eugene Onegin is by far Tchaikovsky’s most popular opera and many would say that in Tchaikovsky’s yearning romantic music the subject had found its ideal interpreter.  Even John Cranko’s 1965 ballet Onegin, also part of the international repertoire, is scored to music by Tchaikovsky.

As director, Gladstone has made appreciating his musical even more difficult by establishing a jolly that completely contradicts the nature of the musical.  Gladstone has the actors enter through the audience to the stage, has Epstein introduce themselves and the roles they play and introduces the three-member band as “The Ungrateful Dead”.  One might think this were sufficient to break the fourth wall, but Gladstone then has Epstein do a bit of mindless interviewing of those in the front row commenting that “Yes, it’s that kind of show”.  He then introduces a drinking game.  At every mention of the word for “love” in Russian (любовь), the cast and two audience members have to down a glass supposedly containing vodka.  When Tatyana send s her letter to Onegin, Epstein has it passed along the whole front row before it reaches him.  In Act 2, when Onegin sends a significant letter to Tatyana, it was passed along in the opposite direction. 

What is so grating is that all this “fun” audience participation, which might work well if Onegin were a comedy, is totally wrong in setting up or maintaining the mood of the tragic story the musical tells.  But Gladstone is not satisfied with that.  He also uses “playful” directorial intervention to ruin important scenes.  The musical has an exact equivalent of Tatyana’s famous “Letter Aria”, but just when Tatyana is about to reach the conclusion of their new version, he has actors give Tatyana an electric guitar and a standing mic so she can belt out her last notes as if a rock star.  This in inappropriate in numerous ways.  Interrupting Tatyana’s main song for a gimmick is bad enough but since Tatyana is supposed to be a shy, naive country girl, the rock star image is completely wrong.  It doesn’t help that Gillis obviously doesn’t know how to play a guitar and has to look down at her left hand every time she changes chords.

Denise Karn’s set is probably the most elaborate ever seen at the Berkeley Street Theatre.  A goal that Tatyana sings about is having a garden and a house full of books.  That is what Karn depicts in the nearly two-storey high walls of the set.  The house she has designed, however, is dilapidated and trees have grown in from the outside through the broken windows suggesting that the roof must be missing.  So where then is the action occurring?  Onegin sings of society as “ghosts upon ghosts upon ghosts” and Lensky emphasizes at the start of Act 2 that we are somewhere in the afterlife though at the same time the chorus sings “It’s Russia, It’s Winter”.  So which is it?

At least Karn has decided where the action is set.  The problem is that Hille and Gladstone have not worked that aspect into the musical either musically or, save in Onegin’s one phrase, into the libretto.  In another recent Canadian musical, John Christenson’s Vigilante (2015), the infamous Donnelly family returns from the dead to tell their side of the story.  There the make-up and costumes added to the impression that the cast were otherworldly figures.  In Onegin that is simply not the case.  If these are the dead come to tell their story, the creators give us no reason why and costume designer Alex Amini does nothing to suggests the characters have been only recently reanimated.  Yet, when one of the characters dies he joins the band of The Ungrateful Dead, whose name we are meant to take literally. 

As Onegin, Daren A. Herbert skilfully distinguishes the haughty Onegin of the first act from the love-lorn Onegin of the second.  While Herbert has no trouble looking and acting cool, he clearly is more alive when he has a strong emotion to communicate as in Act 2.  Given his fine voice it is strange he is given so little to sing on his own.  It is a pity that the creators follow Tchaikovsky’s libretto so closely that they don’t give Onegin a song after the duel when there are so many feelings we’d like to know about or at the very end of the musical. 

As Lensky, Josh Epstein produces a wonderfully strong, clear tone and has amazing control over his dynamics.  He at least, unlike Onegin, is given a powerful song to encapsulate his character’s emotions.  Hailey Gillis is a fine choice for Tatyana.  Her natural expression even when happy seems overcast with melancholy and her velvety tone perfectly suits the delicateness of her character. 

Of the other cast member Rebecca Auerbach and Shane Carty are not given much to do.  Elena Juatco is a fiery, high-pitched Olga and Peter Fernandes plays mostly comic relief – once and very well as the Frenchman Triquet and again with a not-witty-enough song as the duelling master.

Many people will be attracted to Onegin because Hille and Gladstone where are co-creators of Do You Want What I Have Got? A Craigslist Cantata (2012), a very funny and highly inventive work.  There Hille had the task of setting actual listings on Craigslist to music and Gladstone of making the miscellaneous collection cohere.  With Onegin, the inability to improve on the source seems to have stifled the duo’s creativity so that the two employ conflicting strategies in both concept and presentation.  It’s too bad that the musical has already won so many awards and been hailed as “perfection”.  There is much that is good about the work both musically and dramatically, but to work as a whole the piece really requires a major rethink.  Let’s hope that Gladstone and Hille do not rest on their laurels and make Onegin the better musical that it very well could be.   

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.

Photos: (from top) Hailey Gillis, Peter Fernades, Elena Juatco, Shane Carty, Josh Epstein and Rebecca Auerbach; Josh Epstein as Lensky, Hailey Gillis as Tatyana and Daren A. Herbert as Onegin; Daren A. Herbert as Onegin. ©2017 Racheal McCaig.

For tickets, visit http://musicalstagecompany.com or https://nac-cna.ca.