Stage Door News
Stage Door News
Soundstreams final main stage presentation of the 2017/18 season is the Pulitzer Prize winning The Little Match Girl Passion by David Lang, and the world premiere of James Rolfe’s I Think We Are Angels, June 6-7, 2018 at the Crow’s Theatre.
The Little Match Girl is one of Hans Christian Andersen’s best known tales and has attracted interpretations from Jean Renoir to Walt Disney. “What drew me to The Little Match Girl,” explained Lang, “is that the strength of the story lies not in its plot but in the fact that all its parts - the horror and the beauty - are constantly suffused with their opposites. The girl's bitter present is locked together with the sweetness of her memories, her poverty is always suffused with her hopefulness. There is a kind of naive equilibrium between suffering and hope. After all, the message is pretty simple: You need to pay attention to the suffering of people around you. It's not like Grimm's Fairy Tales where you wonder, well, what's that story about?”
James Rolfe’s, I Think We Are Angels will have its world premiere on this program. The work, for four voices and accordion, has a libretto based on the poems of Else Lasker-Schüler, known as "The Queen of Expressionism," a leading woman poet of the movement of poets and artists centred in Berlin.
The Little Match Girl Passion will be a staged, theatrical version of the Lang classic. The cast for these performances will be soprano Vania Chan, mezzo soprano Andrea Ludwig, tenor Colin Ainsworth, baritone Stephen Hegedus, and accordion Michael Bridge. Jennifer Tarver is the creative consultant and John Hess is the musical director.
The Little Match Girl Passion runs June 6-7, 2018 8:00 PM at the Crow’s Theatre. Tickets start at $37.50 and are on sale now at: http://www.soundstreams.ca/performances/main-stage/little-match-girl-passion/.
2018-05-05
Toronto: Soundstreams presents a staged production of David Lang's "The Little Match Girl Passion" June 6-7