Reviews 2016
Reviews 2016
✭✭✭✭✩
by Henry Purcell, direction and new scenario by Marie-Nathalie Lacoursière
Toronto Masque Theatre, Arts & Letters Club, 14 Elm Street, Toronto
May 27-29, 2016
“Ye gentle spirits of the Air, appear;
Prepare, and join your tender voices here” (Act 3)
Toronto Masque Theatre’s production of The Fairy Queen is utterly delightful from beginning to end. Choreographer and director Marie-Nathalie Lacoursière has discovered a brilliant way of re-imagining the work that places the entire emphasis on Henry Purcell’s music which, after all, what has kept the piece alive. Grounded by the exquisite playing of the TMT Ensemble under Larry Beckwith and featuring fine singing and inventive choreography, this is a production that leaves one refreshed and uplifted.
The late 17th-century genre of the semi-opera has always provided difficulties for those who wish to stage them. A semi-opera is a full-length stage play with masque-like musical interludes after each of the acts. The problem is that while the musical interludes often contain glorious music, the plays themselves can be exceedingly tedious. This is the case with The Fairy Queen from 1692 that contains some of the greatest music for the theatre that Henry Purcell ever wrote. The play itself, an anonymous rewriting of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream is unbearably turgid. Opera companies have tried various solutions – actors to plays scenes from Shakespeare’s original between the masques or a narrator to recount the action of the play.
Toronto Masque Theatre’s Marie-Nathalie Lacoursière has come up with the best idea yet. If the music is what people come to enjoy, why not ditch the play completely? In The Fairy Queen the masques are related thematically to the play but are not integral to the action. Lacoursière has taken the music from the masques, devised her own scenario and rearranged the order of the musical numbers to suit it. Purists, of course, may object that the numbers should be presented in the order Purcell gave them. Yet, Lacoursière’s rearrangement is so ingenious and enjoyable that most people will be happy to find Purcell’s music can tell a story without the need for the spoken word at all.
Lacoursière has taken the idea for new new scenario from the first lines of the first masque: “Come, come, come, let us leave the Town / And in some lonely place, /Where crowds and noise were never known”. While this is a reference to the flight for the four lovers in Shakespeare’s play into the enchanted forest, Lacoursière, has made it apply to a cross-section of humanity. Of her version’s two acts, the first is set at train stations where we meet the cast of characters waiting for their trains. This rather unusual station designed by Lindsay Squire features timetables with trains arriving and departing to cities in Europe, North and South America, Africa, the Middle East and Australia. About half of them are marked as “Delayed”.
The general movement from disharmony to harmony is what Lacoursière demonstrates in the singing characters as well. There is a Bride (soprano Janelle Lapalme) and Groom (baritone Graham Robinson), who do not seem too happy together. In fact, it is the Bride who sings “Come, come, come, let us leave the Town” with the apparent hope that things will be better once they are away. There is a Beggar (Cory Knight) whom everyone avoids, plus a Drunken Poet (baritone Alexander Dobson), a character from the original masque, who in many ways becomes the presiding genius of the group. He is tormented by two miniskirted Girls (sopranos Vania Chan and Charlotte Knight), who nevertheless ignore the only other decent single Young Man around (counter-tenor Simon Honeyman), who is dressed as if it were still the ‘70s. There also is a Lonely Girl (soprano Juliet Beckwith), who seems to watch everybody else from the sidelines.
The most comic couple are characters from the third masque in original libretto – the Shepherd Coridon (Graham Robinson again) and the shepherdess Mopsa (played with great humour by tenor Jonathan MacArthur). Costume coordinator Patricia Broms has decided to make Coridon out to be a Texan with a big hat and a fringe jacket who sings “Now the maids and the men are making of hay” with an strong American accent. Mopsa has been done up to look like an Italian movie star of the ‘60s with a headscarf, big hair and big sunglasses. If you think that having Mopsa played in drag is Lacoursière’s idea, it isn’t. When Purcell revised the work he did so deliberately as he says for “Mr. Pate in woman’s habit” likely in order to add to the comedy. For, Coridon is very attracted to Mopsa and wants a kiss, but Mopsa sings, with a double meaning, “Why, how now, Sir Clown, what makes you so bold? / I'd have ye to know I'm not made of that mold.... No. no: no kissing at all”.
Act 1 concludes with the beautiful sequence from the second masque, “Come all ye Songsters of the Sky” with the recorders warbling away like birds. No trains have come, so the two Girls decide to step over the “Planché mouillé” barrier and enter the world outside the man-made world of the station – the world of nature. Lacoursière distinguishes the two by making the small stage of the Arts and Letters Club the station and the auditorium itself the realm of nature so that during the final sequence of Act 1, all the characters step down from the stage and wander to one side of the audience, thus illustrating the words, “Sing while we trip it on the green”.
Act 2 begins with one of the Girls (Vania Chan) invoking “Ye gentle spirits of the air” from the third masque. The music then shifts into the entire fourth masque, “Now the night is chased away” including the celebration of King Oberon (who does not appear) and the lovely sequence of the cycle of the four seasons. Significantly during the Spring section, the Bride and Groom who have seemed out of sorts, now take hands and smile, and in the Winter section the Girls who had previously shunned the Beggar, are the first to put blankets on him. We feel then that Purcell’s music not only celebrates the beauty of nature but also its power to heal rifts in human society
After a reprise of “Hail! Great parent of us all” from the fourth masque, Lacoursière shifts to the fifth and concluding masque, omitting the entire section devoted to Juno and the Chinese Man and Woman, and commencing with “Hark, now the echoing air a triumph sings” which begins the invocation to Hymen, the god of marriage. It so happens that Hymen has been present among the travellers all along – suggesting the happy destiny of the Bride and Groom has been present all along. All it required was the power of nature and time (evidenced in the seasons) to bring about a reconciliation.
With this, the travellers return to the station renewed by their encounter with nature and return to the world-wide train station. Not only are the Bride and Groom celebrated but three other couples form from the most singular of the company. Mopsa finds a mate, as does the Drunken Poet and the Beggar. Thus, while Lacoursière may not follow the precise plot of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, she does follow its general theme of flight from city, healing in the world of nature and a return to the city renewed sufficiently to begin, via marriage, the beginning of a new society.
The voices of most of the nine singers are quite light and a venue with resonant wooden walls like the Arts and Letters Club shows off there voices to the best advantage. All nine are notable for their excellent diction. While the entire libretto is available in the programme, there is no need to follow it since their words are so perfectly clear. Standouts among the cast include Alexander Dobson, who has an enormous voice and therefore sings at a lower volume to match his cast-mates. Even so, the richness of his voice and his expressivity as a singer are marvellous.
As the Bride, Janelle Lapalme’s soprano displays a wonderful fullness and depth, which contrasts pleasingly with the bright, sparking soprano of Vania Chan, who plays one of the Girls.
Larry Beckwith, who directs the seven-member TMT Ensemble from the violin, never fails to choose just the right tempo for every number and the ensemble blends beautifully without losing clarity. Choice of accompaniment varies throughout the opera, from the entire ensemble to just the theorbo of Sylvain Bergeron and the harpsichord of Noam Krieger for some of the quieter. most delectable passages.
As mentioned above, purists may object to Lacoursière’s reassembly of the five masques of The Fairy Queen, but for everyone else Lacoursière’s sensitive new ordering and the excision of all spoken dialogue places Purcell’s music foremost as any production of this work should. The three performances of The Fairy Queen were virtually sold out before they opened. Let’s hope TMT plans a remount in the near future so that more people can experience the joy so abundant in this exciting new vision of the work.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: (from top) Alexander Dobson (blindfolded) Charlotte Knight and Vania Chan; Stéphanie Brochard; Charlotte Knight, Vania Chan, Juliet Beckwith and Janelle Lapalme. ©2016 Michael Ruscigno.
For tickets, visit www.torontomasquetheatre.com.
2016-05-28
The Fairy Queen