TORONTO - Here's good news, perhaps, for those who find themselves in the grips of the February doldrums, without sufficient time or resources to jet away to warmer climes.
The Canadian Opera Company is heating things up with a trip to the ultimate hot spot destination and they've invited their audience to tag along with them. Destination: Hell, in a handbasket.
The opera, as you might suspect, is Charles Francois Gounod's Faust, a dramatic opera in five acts that, after an inauspicious start in Paris almost 150 years ago, has nonetheless proven to be something in the nature of evergreen. The COC production opened Thursday on the stage of the Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts, with Montreal's Yannick Nezet-Seguin conducting the COC Orchestra, and will run in rep with Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk through Feb. 24.
With a libretto written by Jules Barbier and Michael Carre, Faust tells Goethe's familiar story of an aged academic so embittered at the end of his life that he barters his soul to the devil in return for a renewal of youthful vigour.
With that vigour, however, comes youthful passion and once the devil tempts him with a glimpse of a pious young maiden, the rejuvenated Faust finds himself in the throes of a passion that will bend the newfound object of his desires, although it ultimately fails to break her, despite her tragic end.
Canadian tenor David Pomeroy makes a welcome return to the COC to essay the title role, nicely teamed with soprano Ana Ibarra as the virginal Marguerite. Unfortunately, bass-baritone Egils Silins seems to have a devil of a time finding the proper vocal menace in Mephistopheles, thus effectively weakening the vocal triangle over which director Nicholas Muni must attempt to stretch Gounod's work.
In supporting roles, baritone Brett Polegato -- cast as Marguerite's loving, but morally unbending, brother -- lights several impressive vocal fires on stage, while mezzo-soprano Susan Gorton provides comedic grace notes as the meddlesome Marth. Mezzo Lauren Segal, meanwhile, has some lovely moments as the earnest Siebel, although she has yet to learn that there is more to playing a "pant" role than merely jettisoning her skirts.
In fact, with the notable exception of Polegato's supporting turn, Muni fails to draw truly impressive performances from any of his cast -- although Pomeroy and Marguerite do blossom for a few exquisitely moving moments in her garden. Of course, the COC Chorus is, as usual, superb.
But in staging the work, rather than involving us in the tale through performances that are shaped and considered, Muni opts for a directorial approach more concerned with distracting his audience than involving us, hoping apparently that no one will notice in the ensuing melee that his performers are more aimed than directed.
His principal tool in this subterfuge, of course, is an ever-shifting set cobbled together from bits and pieces from the Cincinnati Opera and fleshed out by work from Mark Fox and Dany Lyne.
Comprised of monumental set pieces on which are projected various sketches and doodles meant, one suspects, to evoke some sort of operatic da Vinci code, it becomes at some point a world that is neither heaven nor hell, but rather an occasionally breathtaking no-man's land that could milk the life out of almost any story.
In fairness, acrobats and over-sized puppets serve to mitigate its bleakness somewhat as does Thomas C. Hase's lighting design but, in the end, they only serve to underscore the fact that in this Faust, while the music may be memorable, the visual gamut runs all the way from "where in hell are" to "is hell about to freeze over" -- and the emotion is lost somewhere in between.
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