Reviews 2009
Reviews 2009
✭✭✭✭✩
by Benjamin Britten, directed by Neil Armfield
Canadian Opera Company, Four Seasons Centre, Toronto
May 5-23, 2009
The COC closes its mainstage season with the company premiere of Benjamin Britten’s 1960 operatic version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Shakespeare is the source of innumerable operas, but Britten’s Dream is one of the very few to set Shakespeare’s actual text, albeit in abridged form, to music. The result is truer to the spirit of the play than many spoken-word productions and one that inhabits a fantastical soundworld that envelopes you in its glittering magic.
The world of the fairies is peopled by those with the highest voices. As Tytania and Oberon, coloratura Laura Claycomb and counter-tenor Lawrence Zazzo float easily in the ethereal upper reaches of the voice. In Dale Ferguson’s wildly imaginative costumes, they sound and look gorgeously exotic. The rest of the fairies are sung by the Canadian Children’s Opera Chorus, looking like little white-haired cupids with slingshots instead of bows and arrows. Puck, whom Britten conceives as a speaking role, is played by the acrobatic Jamaal Grant in a more vibrant, charismatic performance than one encounters in most spoken-word productions.
All four of the young lover have fine voices, but only Giselle Allen as Helena and Adam Luther as Lysander seem fully at home on stage. Elizabeth DeShong as Hermia and Wolfgang Holzmair as Demetrius keep their eyes too tightly fixed on the conductor. If Ferguson evokes wonder with the fairies’ costumes, he appeals to our sense of humour by decking the lovers and the mechanicals in stereotypical 1960s outfits. As Peter Quince, Thomas Goerz makes a comically earnest director, but Robert Pomakov as Bottom/Pyramus and Lawrence Wiliford as Flute/Thisbe steal the show. The final play-within-a-play is made even more hilarious by Britten’s witty parodies of 19th-century opera.
The prime disappointment of the production is Ferguson’s set. The three sides are translucent tarpaulins painted with what seem to be upside-down forest scenes and surrounded by visible lighting instruments. Overhead is a huge plastic awning that can dip down to stage level, but which most of the time heaves and rolls above as if the action were set underwater. After a while you wish it would cease its continual motion. This alone is hardly enough to upset the glowing, joyful mood that the marriage of Britten’s music to Shakespeare’s words engenders.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: A version of this review appeared in Eye Weekly 2009-05-07.
Photo: Lawrence Zazzo, Laura Claycomb, and Jamaal Grant. ©Michael Cooper.
2009-05-07
A Midsummer Night’s Dream