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music by James Rolfe, libretto by Morris Panych, directed by Morris Panych

Canadian Stage, Tapestry Opera & Vancouver Opera,

• Bluma Appel Theatre, Toronto

March 29-April 14, 2018;

• Vancouver Opera, Vancouver Playhouse, Vancouver, BC

April 28-May 12, 2018

Akakiy: “My favourite number is zero”

The Overcoat: A Musical Tailoring, the most anticipated new Canadian opera of the 2018/19 season, has opened to enthusiastic acclaim.  The collaboration between James Rolfe, one of Canada’s most successful opera composers, and Morris Panych, one of Canada’s foremost writers of neo-absurdist comedy, creates a satiric comic opera that both does justice to its 19th-century source and makes that story’s relevance abundantly clear.

The source of the opera is Nikolai Gogol’s 1842 short story “The Overcoat” («Шинель») that focusses on a government clerk Akakiy Akakievich Bashmachkin, who is happy enough with his boring daily routine and pays little attention to himself, a fact symbolized by how dilapidated his overcoat is.  After a tailor he knows tells him the coat is beyond repair, he finally agrees to let the man makes him a new one.  When he notices the hugely positively impression the coat makes on his work colleagues, he begins to think that new possibilities will open up for him.  The Head of his Department even invites Akakiy over to his house to celebrate the new coat. 

On his way back home, drunk for the first time, he encounters two men who rob him of the coat.   When Akakiy complains to the police he gets no response.   In Gogol, Akakiy is advised to seek help from an “important personage” and speaks to a recently promoted general .   The encounter, however, leads to Akakiy’s being so tongue-lashed that he falls sick and dies, his ghost haunting St. Petersburg stealing people’s coats.   In Panych’s version, Akakiy does not die.  Rather, his loss of his coat, and hence of his identity, causes him to go mad.   This fits well with Panych’s overall interpretation of the mindless bureaucracy of the real world and society’s habit of judging people by appearances as forms of behaviour that are already insane to begin with.     

The opera, The Overcoat: A Musical Tailoring, has a peculiar subtitle derived from the fact that librettist Panych and movement director Wendy Gorling had created a highly acclaimed wordless, movement-based theatre piece, The Overcoat, based on the same subject in 1997 using prerecorded music by Dmitri Shostakovich.  That production toured North America, England, Australia, New Zealand and elsewhere for more than ten years.  Michael Mori, Artistic Director of Tapestry Opera, a Toronto company devoted to creating new opera, had the idea of turning the movement piece into an opera and brought Panych and Rolfe together. 

The resulting collaboration retains many features of the 1997 piece.  The set and costume design are the same as before, relocating the action to the 1920s with heavy, kohl-ringed eye makeup to reinforce the general look of a silent movie .  Wendy Gorling has adapted her detailed, expressionist-inspired movement, but this means that all cast members, singers as well as the two “movement performers”, not only have to be fine actors but also have to be athletic enough to perform her strenuous choreography with verve and precision.

The admirable cast fully fulfils these requirements with the result that Rolfe’s Overcoat gives the impression of a hybrid of opera and ballet.  Baritone Geoffrey Sirett gives a brilliant performance as Akakiy, whose full name is often used for satiric purposes.  Panych changes Akakiy’s occupation from that of clerk to accountant.  This allows Panych to make frequent puns on what “counts” in life referring either to general importance or to money.  Sirett plays Akakiy as a sympathetic innocent, a man so obsessed with numbers and mathematics that he barely notices the people around him.  Sirett’s Akakiy begins to bloom when he gets his new coat and dares to think that a greater, more social life may open up to him because he sees that people treat him so much better. 

Yet, if the opera has one failing it is in not giving Akakiy a long enough aria to express his feelings.  His joy at first seeing the coat would be the obvious place for such an aria, but Panych instead uses Akakiy’s wordless waltz with his coat, an idea left over from the 1997 version.   The place Panych and Rolfe choose is when Akakiy reflects on the new social possibilities his coat could lead to.   This could have been the character’s major aria, but unfortunately it ends before it has had time to make an impact.  Sirett, therefore, has to content himself with heavenly pianissmi and delicate phrasing to show off the warmth of his voice rather than a full unleashing of its expressive power.

Curiously, the character granted a full-scale aria is soprano Andrea Ludwig as Akakiy’s Landlady.  Ludwig already has several humorous turns as the Landlady unsuccessfully flirts with Akakiy, but an aria predicting the doom that Akakiy’s new overcoat will bring him gives Ludwig a fine opportunity to display the velvety tone of her mezzo-soprano and her mastery of its full range.

Peter McGillivray is very funny as the pompous Head of Akakiy’s Accounting Department who speaks at length without having anything to say.  But McGillivray makes a greater impression as Petrovich, the drunken, snuff-addicted tailor who grudgingly makes Akakiy’s overcoat.  His comically booming attempts at bartering and self-promotion are punctuated by snuff-taking mimicked by upward glissandi on the piano.  Firm-voiced Erica Iris Huang provides an excellent foil for the Tailor’s eccentricities as his sensible Wife.  

Otherwise, Rolfe’s most interesting vocal writing is for the female trio – Magali Simard-Galdes, Caitlin Wood and Erica Iris Huang – who make up the Mad Chorus.  They are present from the start of the action but unseen by Akakiy, and empathetically narrate his story in delectable close harmony.

At his workplace, Panych and Rolfe give Akakiy a parallel trio of male work colleagues – Aaron Durand, Keith Klassen and Giles Tomkins – who also sing in close harmony, but, unlike the Mad Chorus, continually mock and bully Akakiy.  Their presence is augmented by Meher Pavri and her deep mezzo as a vampish Secretary and negative counterpart to Akakiy’s Landlady, and the Department’s manager, the bright-voiced Asitha Tennekoon.  The incredibly agile Colin Heath and Courtenay Stevens serve as the non-singing “movement performers” who haunt both Akakiy’s work and private life.             

Rolfe’s musical medium takes into account the 1997 piece’s use of Shostakovich through driving rhythms and jazzy modulations, especially at the start of Act 2, but Rolfe deliberately tones down Shostakovich’s palette to the pastels of a composer like Steve Reich and regularizes his rhythms more in accordance with modern minimalism also quite like Reich.  When melodies appear Panych’s love of rhyme allows Rolfe to shift his style seamlessly into an entertainingly Sondheimian mode.  Rolfe also indulges in outright quotation as when the inmates of a madhouse greet the new patient Akakiy to the strains of Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy”, used ironically, of course, and with completely different lyrics.

Les Dala ably conducts a twelve-member ensemble that revels in Rolfe’s tangy sonorities and playfully off-kilter rhythms.  It rarely plays at full force but rather in solos, duets and trios that give the work the intimate feel of a chamber opera.  The opening night audience greeted the singers and the creative team with unbounded acclaim.  Gogol’s satire of a society that values people for what they look like rather than what they are seems even more biting in this age saturated with social media.  With tweaks to allow the singer playing Akakiy to display more fully his vocal mastery, this delightful new opera could well enjoy a long life.

       

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a version of one that will appear in Opera News later this year

Photos: (from top) Geoffrey Sirett as Akakiy with his overcoat; Geoffrey Sirett as Akakiy with his work colleagues; Geoffrey Sirett with Magali Simard-Galdés, Erica Iris Huang and Caitlin Wood. ©2018 Dahlia Katz.

For tickets, visit www.canadianstage.com or www.vancouveropera.ca.