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by Igor Stravinsky, directed by Robert Lepage

Canadian Opera Company, Four Seasons Centre, Toronto

October 17-November 5, 2009

Robert Lepage has given the COC another triumph in his production of The Nightingale and Other Short Fables.  His previous COC production, Bluebeard’s Castle/Erwartung in 1993 brought new audiences to the opera because of its sheer theatrical genius.  Nightingale is certain to do the same and is even more accessible.  Where Bluebeard was dark and disturbing, Nightingale is buoyant and playful.  It is, without question, the must-see theatrical experience of the year.

Inspired by several Asian puppet theatre traditions, Lepage breaks all the rules of conventional operatic staging.  For starters, he places the orchestra on stage and puts a tank holding 67,000 litres of water in the pit.  The water becomes the aquatic stage for The Nightingale while two platforms on either side of the water plus another behind the orchestra half-hidden by a long, narrow screen become the prime playing areas for the first half of the evening.  For this half, Lepage has chosen six short instrumental and vocal pieces finishing with the short opera Renard, a folk-tale about a wily fox and her comeuppance.  

Lepage productions always, at some level, examine the nature of theatre.  The introductory non-operatic pieces are illustrated by that simplest form of theatre--hand-puppetry--with amusingly inventive shadows cast on the front of the screen by five amazingly talented acrobat/puppeteers.  Renard is illustrated by the same five who combine tumbling with Balinese-style puppets, this time casting shadows from behind the screen.  The Nightingale itself is accompanied by an utterly fantastic display of Vietnamese water puppetry, where lavishly costumed singers, waist-deep in water, move boats across the tank while animating the intricately detailed puppets aboard them.  Thus Lepage takes us in a journey not just through Stravinsky but through puppetry itself, from the simple and two-dimensional to the elaborate  and three-dimensional, ending, in fact, with notion that art frees man from the hand of death.

With few exceptions the music is performed to perfection--Renard crisp and comic, The Nightingale lush and mysterious.  Olga Peretyatko’s voice gorgeously soars and flutters as the Nightingale.  Lothar Odinus conveys all the warmth of the Fisherman who loves her song.  Ilya Bannik brings out both the pride and humility in the Emperor she saves.  By the end Lepage’s production overwhelms us with its wit and beauty and makes us believe we have not fully lost our childlike sense of wonder.                

©Christopher Hoile

Note: A version of this review appeared in Eye Weekly 2009-07-03.

Photo: Olga Peretyatko and Ilya Bannik. ©Michael Cooper.