Mary Knickle (Mother) and Ruth Ernst (Amahl)
I’m having a fabulous time directing my first Amahl and the Night Visitors for Maritime Concert Opera!
We have a lovely community-based cast and chorus, and simply gorgeous costumes by the talented Anne Morison. It’s a blast!
The show goes up Saturday January 7 at Bridgewater United Church and Sunday January 8 at St John’s Anglican in Lunenburg. Both shows start at 3 pm.
More info at the MCO Website
Thanks to Kate Watson of The Coast for naming RENT #5 of the ten best stage shows in Halifax for 2011!
5. Rent (DGM Music Inc.): A big, bold production filled with youthful enthusiasm and mad talent.
The young artists who perform in Jonathan Larson’s update of Puccini’s La Boheme are truly remarkable. They sing dance, and in the case of the rockin’ pit band, play their way through 47 songs with energy, passion and above all, talent.
It’s hard to single anyone out, because truly, they are a mega-talented cast, but I was blown away Jonathan MacArthur as the sashaying sunny-side-up Angel and by his loving and lovable partner Collins played by Matthew Beasant. There duet “I’ll Cover You” was one of the show’s (many) highlights and the reprise of it in Act 2 left not a dry eye in the house.
Geordie Brown was sensational as Roger and the duet “Light My Candle” that he sings with Mimi (beautifully played by Jessica Lynn DeCastro) is another show stopper.
There were some sound issues and not all the lyrics were clear, but overall all I really want to say is “Wow! Don’t miss this show.”
TICKETS: $37.50 and $29.50 at Ticket Atlantic locations and online. Saturday, 8 p.m., at the Spatz Theatre, Citadel High
Taylor Long, Alyssa McCarthy, Mike Hart, Jonathan MacArthur, Meghan Jamieson, Matthew Beasant, Adrianna Pagnottella, Jeremy Dutcher, Sarah Slemko, Ben Irvine, Jessica DeCastro, Kat Mackin-Smith, Geordie Brown, Allie MacDonald
AIDS version of Puccini story haunts
By STEPHEN PEDERSEN in the Halifax Chronicle Herald
Fri, Oct 14 – 5:03 AM
It was the one and only dress rehearsal of DGM Music’s production of Jonathan Larson’s Rent in the Spatz Theatre in Halifax on Wednesday night. But, to my eyes and ears, it was already ready for prime time.
In fact, to any eye and ear, this is a supercharged, high-energy production with little dialogue to interrupt the rock tsunami of some 47 songs sweeping irresistibly over the audience in an endless flow of unbridled youthful passion, Puccini-esque melodrama and rock-operatic hysterics.
Larson’s Rent, loosely based on Puccini’s La Boheme, is, as one reviewer remarked, “a rock opera for our time, a Hair for the ’90s.”
But Hair’s ring-finger defiance of middle-class conventions has been replaced in Rent by furious and despairing anger triggered by the pain and searing distress of AIDS to both victims and those who love them. It tears people apart, which is one of the meanings of the word, although in the play, it refers to a group of bohemians who are unable to pay to live in their New York loft.
The fury of the score, expressed in its relentless drive and savage lyrics, is an Allen Ginsberg-like Howl against the disease that fell ferociously upon Generation X like the plague that periodically decimated European populations from the Middle Ages to the 17th century.
In La Boheme, the heroine Mimi, is dying of tuberculosis, poetically termed consumption in the 19th century. Her death and her on-again, off-again romance with the impoverished poet Rodolfo focus the emotion of La Boheme into a heroic struggle. And audiences weep with the astonishingly powerful music Puccini wrote for it.
But in Rent, all but one of the main characters have HIV, and two have full-blown AIDS, and die from it.
There is also much humour. But it is black humour. And there is much anger, but also much love.
In Rent, Puccini’s quartet of artists sharing a drafty garret include the poet Rodolfo (singer-songwriter Roger Davis in Rent, played in this production by Geordie Brown), the painter Marcello (Rent’s indie filmmaker and narrator Mark Cohen, played by Allie MacDonald), the musician Schaunard (Rent’s heart-of-gold drag queen, played by Jonathan MacArthur) and the philosopher Colline (Rent’s gay part-time philosophy professor and anarchist Tom Collins, played by Matthew Besant).
Puccini’s Musetta is transmogrified into lesbian performance artist Maureen Johnson, played by Alyssa McCarthy.
Puccini’s consumptive heroine Mimi becomes Rent’s Mimi Marquez, a dancer and stripper played by Jessica DeCastro.
Jeremy Dutcher plays Benny, the landlord who tries to give his tenants a break but is still in love with Mimi, his former girlfriend. Roger’s jealousy of Benny causes him to reject Mimi and leads to passionate reconciliations.
The plot is difficult to follow in detail, but not at all in general. Mark is making a documentary film, Roger is writing a song, perhaps his last, since he will probably die of AIDS, and all pursue their art in their own ways against a background of terminal illness, support groups, cold weather, Christmas carols and a riot caused by the closing of a public park to street people.
The lyrics are not always clear, but the singers, many from the Dalhousie University music and theatre departments, are astonishingly strong. Rent speaks their language. All of these young people sing it with a native accent.
Musical director Stephanie McKeown has put together a crackerjack rock band, while stage director Nina Scott-Stoddart, who has extraordinarily deep and thorough dramatic instincts, has shaped the performance into a powerful theatrical experience.
Be prepared for adult language and situations. Rent is for mature audiences. Oh yes, and bring a tissue or two.
Link to review on Chronicle Herald site
[NB: The original review credited Nina Scott-Stoddart as vocal coach -- Matt Beasant was vocal coach, and a damned good one 
]
| Opera for our time Performers revel in Rent’s take on Puccini tale of star-crossed bohemians By ELISSA BARNARD Arts Reporter Wed, Oct 12 – 4:53 AM
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OPERA SINGER, director and producer Nina Scott-Stoddart wasn’t sure she could switch from opera to musical theatre for the Broadway version of Rent.
She needn’t have worried. “It sprang out of La Boheme and I am fascinated by that connection to the opera. I love it,” she says, during an interview at Coburg Coffee House. “We have a full band, it’s a full set, and I’m working with the most extraordinary performers.”
Her enthusiasm is matched by actors Allie MacDonald and Geordie Brown, who are extremely high-energy, even though they are not drinking coffee.
The Broadway version of Rent, Thursday to Saturday at the Spatz Theatre, is produced by David McLean, an 18-year-old guitarist who founded the production company DGM Music Inc. with his parents, Steve and Aissa McLean, and his music teacher, Stephanie McKeown, musical director for Rent.
This is DGM’s first production and Scott-Stoddart’s first time directing musical theatre. She took out the Rent DVD the day after she was hired. “It’s very visceral and emotional. Puccini would have loved it.”
Rent, which has just reopened in New York, is Jonathan Larson’s Tony Award-winning 1996 rock opera based on Giacomo Puccini’s La Boheme. It tells the story of a group of impoverished young artists and musicians struggling to survive and create in New York’s Lower East Side under the shadow of AIDS.
Allie MacDonald knows the show inside out. He played Angel in a 2009 Antigonish production by the Music of the Night and has seen it eight times, including a community show in Moncton, a high school version and the Broadway version in both Boston and Toronto.
“We call him our Encyclopedia of Rent,” says Brown, who plays Roger Davis, an HIV-positive musician recovering from heroin addiction.
The show is very personal for MacDonald. “When I was Angel I was coming out as a gay man. It speaks to my community.”
This time he’s playing Mark Cohen, Roger’s best friend and a struggling documentary filmmaker. Mark is trying to find his voice as an artist. “That relates to me,” says MacDonald, a student in Neptune Theatre’s pre-professional training program.
“I’m trying to find myself artistically now. I’m at a point in my life where I should be playing this role.”
This past summer the Antigonish actor won Festival Antigonish’s Addy Doucette Award for outstanding portrayal of a character for his part as Danny Zuko in Grease.
Part of the cast comes from an opera background and part from a theatre background “and Geordie is right smack in the middle,” says Scott-Stoddart, who was director of Dalhousie University Opera Workshop for four years.
Brown, winner at 15 of Dartmouth’s Natal Day Talent Contest, an actor in Edges at the 2009 Atlantic Fringe Festival and a cantor at St. Mary’s Basilica, is a double major at Dalhousie University in voice and theatre. “I’d like to do it all. I love musical theatre and playing the piano and singing and doing film and I want to direct.”
He loves Rent. “It’s real people, living real lives, singing real emotion,” he says. “The music is so good. People could get their money’s worth if they just looked at it as a rock concert but people will definitely connect emotionally.”
Brown has also designed the poster. “Everybody is picking up the loose ends. It’s a new company and we could use a new theatre company in this city to have a place to perform. We really want to see it be a hit.”
Scott-Stoddart is surprised her young cast relates so strongly to Rent. “You’re 20,” she says to Brown and MacDonald, “and I’m 50 and I had my time homeless on the streets of Toronto with my friends dying of AIDS, after university in the early ’90s, at the time this piece was written.
“For me and people of my generation there’s the reality of struggling as artists and of people dying of AIDS and it surprises me it still is relevant. It still connects emotionally and that’s a sign of a really good work of art.”
It’s been a busy few weeks since the end of the Halifax Summer Opera Workshop, because I was hired to direct the biggest production of RENT ever brought to Halifax.
We have a wonderful cast, a great pit band, and we’re putting together a very good version of a really special musical.
For more information about the Halifax RENT, please visit the production company website: DGM Music Inc.
Darrell Hicks, centre, as Hoffman, Allyssa McCarthy, left, as Olympia and Nicholas Borg as Coppélius appear in The Tales of Hoffman in the Sir James Dunn Theatre at Dalhousie. The production is part of the Halifax Summer Opera Workshop.(Adrien Veczan)
The Halifax Summer Opera Workshop production of Offenbach’s The Tales of Hoffmann may be an amateur production but it has what many professional productions lack. It has heart, passion, imagination and, most important, energy and belief.
For all these reasons it works as a first-rate theatrical experience. It is true the voices are uneven and fatigue can slightly dim a glory during a prosy passage. But when the stakes are high and the chips are down, all the voices rise triumphantly in the fevered glory of Offenbach’s emotional poetry.
The story is told in three acts plus a prologue and epilogue.
This is how it goes. Hoffmann is a poet. He is drunk. His drinking buddies call for a story.
Brooding off to one side sits Lindorf, his arch rival for the love of the opera singer Stella. Next door to the pub is an opera house where Stella is singing in a production of Mozart’s Don Giovanni, which incidentally is a story of a serial seducer who perishes in the fires of hell.
Each of his three loves was destroyed by Lindorf, Hoffmann says. The women are Olympia, a mechanical doll that he sees as a human because of special glasses; the beautiful and seductive courtesan Giulietta and the consumptive soprano Antonia, who will die if she sings. All three women are aspects of Stella.
Lindorf, who is also split into three parts, is the force that destroys Hoffmann’s loves. In Act 1, he is the mad scientist Coppelius, an avatar, in the folk-tale version of the Sandman, who gouges out the eyes of sleepless children. He destroys Olympia, after stealing her eyes, because Spalanzani, his co-inventor of the marvellous singing and dancing doll, defaults on his fee.
In Act 2, Lindorf manifests as Capt. Dapertutto. He collects people’s shadows through Giulietta and has already collected the shadow of Schlemil by this method. Hoffmann kills Schlemil in a duel with a weapon provided by Dapertutto and flees. Giulietta blows him a kiss as she leaves with Dapertutto.
Antonia cannot resist singing in Act 3 even though she knows it will kill her. Her mother, also an opera singer, is dead. Her father, Crespel, tries to persuade Hoffmann to help him keep Antonia from singing. But another version of Lindorf appears in the person of the evil Dr. Miracle. He pretends to cure Antonio with drugs and encourages her to sing. He also attended Antonia’s mother before she died.
Antonia dies in Hoffmann’s arms after letting her voice go free in a duet with the ghost of her mother that constitutes the emotional climax of opera. It is a powerful scene. The music is irresistibly poignant and glorious. Bring a Kleenex. Bring two.
In the epilogue, Hoffmann’s faithful companion, Niklausse, reveals herself as a woman and declares her love for Hoffmann. She is a fourth personification — woman as muse.
Hoffman passes out drunk. Stella comes to find him for their scheduled rendezvous after her performance. He is clearly out of it. So she goes off with Lindorf.
The End.
There are two casts for this show. The Hoffman for the opening cast was Darrell Hicks, from Ontario. His robust voice richly coloured Hoffmann’s many arias and duets. His pitch flagged slightly in the Giulietta scene but he recovered well.
Nova Scotia’s Alyssa McCarthy all but stopped the show with her performance as Olympia. Even through her jerky mechanical actions, we caught a sense of the sweet young girl Hoffmann perceived through his goggles. Carl Ellinwood Jr.’s mechanical actions as Spalanzani’s assistant were wonderfully comic as we realized that he, too, was a puppet.
The glorious finale of the Giulietta act revealed the astonishingly mature and beautiful voice of British Columbia’s Tamara Rusque.
Director Nina Scott-Stoddart’s staging of this scene, which features the famous Barcarolle, was strikingly imaginative to the point of brilliance. Couples repose in pairs as though seated in gondolas but as the scene shifts to a brothel, they pair off to play stylized, slow-motion, sex games, with women wielding switches as they gently spank their partners.
Nova Scotia’s Matthew Beasant delivered a strong, powerfully musical performance as Dr. Miracle in the Antonia act.
Ontario soprano Andrea Cerswell as Antonia was one of the vocal glories of the opera. Her voice is strong though somewhat light. It was superbly supported by her acting talent. She hooked us good.
Ontario’s Jessica Lane delivered a strong, consistent performance as Niklausse.
Stephen Pedersen (formerly of the Halifax Chronicle Herald) has written a review of the latest Dal Opera Workshop — check out Stephen Pedersen’s blog for the story.
Students tackle opera set in bar, Puccini
Face on Barroom Floor is dark, balanced by comic Gianni Schicci
By ANDREA NEMETZ Entertainment Reporter
Thu. Feb 4 – 4:54 AM
Josh Whelan no longer aspires to be Bon Jovi.
Now he wants to be Giorgio Zancanaro, an Italian baritone and Verdi specialist.
But, Whelan acknowledges, the comparison might not be so strange — not long ago, opera singers were the rock stars of their day.
Whelan, a 21-year-old graduate of Halifax West High School, is in his third year of a degree in vocal performance at Dalhousie University. This week, he takes on a role that will challenge his dramatic skills when he takes to the stage for the Dalhousie Opera Workshop in the Sir James Dunn Theatre at the Dalhousie Arts Centre.
Music department students will present a double bill of The Face on the Barroom Floor, by Henry Mollicone, and Puccini’s Gianni Schicci.
“I’ve done comedy in the past, so this is very challenging for me,” Whelan says of The Face on the Barroom Floor. “It’s very intense, focused and dark, with a lot of subtext. It’s not just right on the surface.
“The story itself makes the vocals challenging. There is a lot of very intense high drama and context that needs to be portrayed through the voice.”
Whelan, who studies under Marcia Swanston, is one of five students in The Face on the Barroom Floor. He will share the role of the bartender with Iain MacNeil. Sopranos Sarah Loveys and Becca Topp split the part of the love interest, and tenor Geordie Brown wanders into the bar with an interesting story to tell.
“It’s based on a poem by Hugh Antoine D’Arcy written in 1887,” Whelan says, noting that the story takes place in the present and past.
“The opera was composed more recently (in 1978) and is about a Midwest Colorado bar. A vagabond painter comes in and the story unfolds that he once had a love, and after a lot of drinks the painter paints a picture of the girl he loved. It’s the bar girl, who is hired to dance and please customers, and that doesn’t go over well with the bartender and they get in a fight, and the bar girl gets in on the fight and dies, and her spirit hangs in the bar and the same history keeps repeating over time.”
The Face on the Barroom Floor will feature music director Lynette Wahlstrom on piano, Chris Mitchell on flute and Peter Goddard on cello. Gianni Schicci, conducted by Gregory Servant, will have Dean Bradshaw on piano.
Both operas will be under the direction of Nina Scott-Stoddart. Shows are scheduled for tonight, Friday and Saturday at 7:30 p.m. and Sunday at 2:30 p.m.
Among Whelan’s credits with the Dalhousie Opera Workshop are David in A Hand of Bridge (“a very creepy role . . . that gives insight into the more obscure psyches humans possess”), Eisenstein in Die Fledermaus and Orpheus in Orpheus in the Underworld. He’s also done La Traviata, Carmen and Tosca with the Maritime Concert Opera, also under the direction of Scott-Stoddart.
In contrast to the intensity of The Face on the Barroom Floor, Gianni Schicci is Puccini’s only comic farce and has been one of his most popular operas since its premiere in 1918.
Johnathon Kirby plays the title role, which he says is a bit over the top.
“Our production is set in Sicily in the 1930s and the old don dies and the rest of the family expects money, but he gives it to the friars instead,” says the 21-year-old baritone from Newmarket, Ont.
“Gianni Sicchi comes up with a plot to get them the money. The subtext is my daughter, Lauretta, is in love with a younger member of the family and needs a dowry to get married.”
At one point, Lauretta (Jillian Bonner, Natacha Fam or Lauren Estey in a shared role) sings the famous aria O Mio Babbino Caro.
Kirby, in his third year of study at Dal under Servant, previously played Falke in Die Fledermaus and Jupiter in Orpheus in the Underworld.
His role in Gianni Schicchi isn’t as much dramatically demanding as “a big sing that tests my range,” he says.
“I didn’t have the ability to sing it a year ago. It’s a testament to my progress. It’s a good challenge and I relish the challenge.”
Meanwhile, Maria Murphy is relishing her return to the stage after working behind the scenes doing stage management for Orpheus in the Underworld and the Halifax Summer Opera Workshop.
“I play Ciesca, one of the crazy, greedy, family members,” says Murphy, a 21-year-old soprano from Saint John, N.B. “She’s pretty out there. She’s sex-crazed about money; like a nymphomaniac. The family is self-centred, entitled, incredibly greedy and manipulative.
“It’s fun to channel some energy in that direction. She’s a very fun character to play . . . it’s interesting to dive into her eccentricities.”
She describes Gianni Schicchi as an ensemble in which she sings a line and another character picks it up.
“Everyone has to listen to everyone else,” she says. “There’s only a couple of arias, mainly it’s picking up on lines, like they’re having conversations.”
Murphy, a fourth-year student specializing in musicology and vocal performance under Swanston, says she’s changed her major several times.
“I’ve done conducting and opera stage production and I love everything,” she says. “I want to get a taste of everything before I graduate this year.”
She hopes to pursue graduate studies in musicology, which she describes as a musical analysis paired with all liberal arts.
“There’s lots of reading and writing, you have history, theory and social sciences all combined with music,” she says.
Kirby plans to go for a master’s degree in performance, specializing in opera, while Whelan, who is Kirby’s roommate, hopes to do a young artist program in Germany or France.
( anemetz@herald.ca)
Cast handles lively score, pretty tunes in Offenbach’s classic
By STEPHEN PEDERSEN Arts Reporter
Sat. Feb 7 – 6:51 AM
After decades of movies, TV dramas and sitcoms, it’s always a surprise to discover how many belly-laughs a witty operetta from 150 years ago can trigger.
But the delight, as always, depends on the quality of the production. Dalhousie Opera Workshop not only meets this requirement but takes it over the top in its production of Jacques Offenbach’s satirical Orpheus in The Underworld which opened in the Dunn on Thursday night and continues tonight and Sunday afternoon.
It would be hard to find a livelier score with prettier tunes and more endorphin-tweaking dances than Offenbach’s. And it all climaxes with the happiest, hell-raisingest dance of all, the fiery Galop, which Paris’s naughty Moulin Rouge stole from Offenbach and renamed the can-can.
The Dalhousie production is full of inventive twists and modern staging — cellphones have invaded Mount Olympus, home of Jupiter and the other Greek gods, and the iPod, with savage poetic justice, has found a new home in Hell.
The youthful cast fills the stage with pretty, lively women and brawny, good-looking men. Egged on by a clever, hilarious new translation of the libretto by Jeremy Sams, and shoved over the conventional boundaries of inventiveness by the infectious goofiness of director Nina Scott-Stoddart, the actors have discovered their natural clown, and are, gratefully, entirely unself-conscious about it.
Their physical and vocal wit is full of spontaneity.
Jonathan McArthur as Pluto, disguised at the start as the shepherd Aristeus in order to seduce Orpheus’s wife Euridice, is comically effeminate before metamorphosing into the demonically deft emcee and mastermind of the Underworld. His affected manner appeals to Euridice (Katrina Weston), bored out of her mind by having to listen to another violin tune written by her husband Orpheus.
Except for the first scene, the remaining three in this operetta take place after death, beginning with an ambrosia slumber on Mount Olympus, and ending up with a wild party in Hell.
Josh Whelan plays a modern Jupiter, indulgent but in control, or so he thinks. He packs an awkwardly sized thunderbolt just in case. Whelan wittily conveys the contradiction within his character. Jupiter tries to be stern and lectures his children on morality, but they will have none of it. They know too much of his bizarre sex life. They mutiny, mounting a protest with pickets, when he gets too bossy.
Whelan punctures his own dignity by mincing off and on-stage at top speed, entirely on the tips of his toes.
The singing is very good, though prepare yourself for trebly voices — these are young singers. But their pitch and their intonation as well as their ability to sustain phrases is a delight.
Transcendent comic bits are too many to mention. Katrina Westin does a trim Public Opinion in a neat business suit, and Paul Medeiros, who plays the violin for Orpheus, does a terrific send-up of the concert virtuoso, and he has the chops to do it.
But the comic laureate award of the show goes to Matthew Beasant-McKeown whose performance as the ferryman John Styx is prime. His job, in Greek mythology, is to ferry the newly dead over Lethe, the river of forgetfulness. This John Styx is drunk on forgetfulness, frequently resorting to a flask of it he conceals on his person. It plays the devil with his short-term memory but one thing blazes through his consciousness: he is totally turned on by Euridice. She fends him off calling for Pluto to rescue her.
Gary Ewer conducts the show, which guarantees an alert ensemble able to play comedy without singing out of tune or messing up the ensemble. The Dalhousie Vocal Music studio, Greg Servant and Marcia Swanston, prepared the singers excellently, and pianist Dean Bradshaw supplied a light, sparkling touch to Offenbach’s scintillating score.
The show is double-cast, playing twice each on alternate performances over the four shows.
(spedersen@herald.ca)
