Z IS FOR ZOROASTER: a May Music Theatre Alphabet

by Sarah B. Hood

A IS FOR ALEXANDER'S ANNIVERSARY
The Alexander Singers and Players are celebrating a birthday. It's the 15th anniversary of the company, which began as a summer choir under the direction of Angela Hawaleshka.

Named for Hawaleshka's father (a Gilbert and Sullivan fan), the group's premiere production was the short, early G&S operetta Trial by Jury. By now they have done most of the well known G&S hits at least once, as well as other operettas and musicals like The Merry Widow, Die Fledermaus, Oklahoma and Sweeney Todd. Today, as an ensemble of more than 60 members from a diverse range of backgrounds, the Alexander Singers and Players have an educational mandate, ensuring that members have a chance to move from smaller to larger roles as their skills grow.

For their 15th birthday they are presenting (in my opinion) one of the most charming and lyrical of all the G&S favourites, Iolanthe, about the banished fairy and her son who loves a shepherdess. Iolanthe runs from May 11 to 19 at the Leah Posluns Theatre.

B IS FOR BREATH(e)
It's hard to guess what to say about a production that's billed as having neither words nor actors, but those who saw BREATH(e) in its previous incarnation (a sold-out and extended run in November 2000) seem to be wildly impressed. Nightwood Theatre's Artistic Director Kelly Thornton says that it "turns the stage into a painting, a living interactive landscape that invites the audience on a trip into the imagination." Theatre Passe Muraille's Artistic Director Layne Coleman said "It was a transcendent experience that was original and life-affirming," while playwright and performer James O'Reilly went so far as to describe it as "pretty close to a religious experience."

BREATH(e), which is apparently inspired by Samuel Beckett's wordless play BREATH, is the brainchild of prolific stage designer Steve Lucas, and perhaps represents the designer's ultimate victory over the tyranny of director and performers. It qualifies as music theatre in that it includes an original musical component designed by Steve Gordon Marsh, who often works with inventive taped music-and-sound compilations (most recently for Mojo at 26 Berkeley Street).

BREATH(e)  runs to May 18 at The Theatre Centre, and the hour-on-the-hour start times read more like a train schedule than a play listing (check listings). The seating capacity for this show is said to be extremely limited (some seating arrangements in that space can accommodate as few as 25 people at a time), so if you're intrigued, you should move quickly or risk missing it.

C1 IS FOR CHARLOTTETOWN...
which is where Nancy Phillips and Bob Ashley first collaborated, on a show called Lies and Other Lyrics. Lies... premiered at the Charlotte-town Festival in the 1970s and later toured to Toronto. Now Phillips and Ashley are working together again with a new show called Friends, Lovers, Husbands, which runs at 26 Berkeley Street from May  9 to June 1 and takes an urbane look at married life. Phillips (book and lyrics) has written in most disciplines: as a magazine and newspaper journalist, an ad writer and a playwright. Ashley (music) is an original member of the Guess Who and a Dora Award winner for his musical direction of Piaf - Her Songs - Her Loves. Torontonians may also know his Stan Rogers - A Matter of Heart, which played in Toronto not too long ago.

C2 is for Charlottetown too
Charlottetown is also the usual haunt of Duncan McIntosh, since he's the Artistic Director of the Charlottetown Festival. No stranger to Toronto, though, the former Artistic Director of Theatre Plus Toronto is here co-directing and co-choreographing Gilbert and Sullivan's The Mikado with Anne Allen for another musical "C": the Canadian Children's Opera Chorus. With all the key roles played by young people between the ages of 10 and 15, this production marks a world premiere of David Mackie's arrangement of the operetta for treble voices. (Watch out for 2004's opera version of J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit, also commissioned for treble voices.) The Mikado is to be presented May 11 and 12 at the du Maurier Theatre Centre at Harbourfront Centre.
 
 

Hmmm, reality intervenes: there's not enough space to continue right through the alphabet, so I'm going to cheat a teeny bit and skip to:

Z FOR ZOROASTER
R. Murray Schafer certainly has a sense of the dramatic... and also a taste for interesting spaces (whether those are natural or human-made). His Toronto productions have included Ra in the early 1980s, which initiated audience members into the cultic practices of ancient Egypt in a dusk-to-dawn ritual of the rebirth of the ancient sun god. Ra used various settings inside the Ontario Science Centre to simulate a descent into the underworld. Ritual meals were, of course, included. A decade later The Alchemical Theatre of Hermes Trismagistos had crowds waiting expectantly outside Union Station for an operatic spectacle that began on the stroke of midnight, shrouding the prosaic ticket booths and placing singers in upper windows of the station's impressive vaulted halls.

Schafer's newest Toronto production, which also is the final installment in Soundstreams Canada's "Encounters in New Music" concert series for this season, is true to form. Zoroaster has 10 p.m. and midnight start times (May 24 and 25), and the setting is the elegant and impressive Design Exchange on Bay near King, which was at one time the home of the Toronto Stock Exchange.

Zoroaster (also known as Zarathustra, as in "Thus spake..."), was a Persian prophet who lived from 628 to 555 BCE. The founder of Zoroastrianism, his teachings, based on even earlier pantheistic worship, are written down in the holy text known as Zend Avesta.

The production promises the re-imagining of a "spectacular ancient Persian ritual imbued with mysticism, magic and the occult", and boasts a cast of 150. Singers Andrew Tees and Eleanor James, and percussionist Ryan Scott are joined by the Amadeus Choir, the Penthelia Singers and the Victoria Scholars. David Buley provides musical direction, while no less than Tom Diamond directs the stage action. And Schafer (who worked with Robert Desrosiers for his fall spectacle The Palace of the Cinnabar Phoenix) has chosen David Earle to choreograph this production.

Longtime Schafer collaborator Diana Smith provides sets and costumes.

Sarah B. Hood is the editor of Performing Arts in Canada magazine.

He Shoots He Scores

On April 18 the Toronto Maple Leafs played the New York Islanders at the Air Canada Centre in Game 1 of the NHL Stanley Cup playoffs.  The day before the game Toronto Maple Leafs' president Ken Dryden called Richard Bradshaw,  the Canadian Opera Company's general director, to ask "Do you have a singer?"

It seems that the scheduled national anthem singer was ill and a replacement was needed pronto.  Well, of course Richard Bradshaw had a singer.

So that is how bass Robert Pomakov ( Varlaam in the COC's Boris Godunov) came to be singing the national anthems for the opening game of the NHL playoffs.  Robert was the natural choice as he is studying at the Curtis (Joseph?) Institute in Philadelphia, so his repertoire includes the Star-Spangled Banner as well as O Canada. It was a great start to the game, and the Leafs made a dramatic finish, scoring three goals in the third act for a 3-1 win over the Islanders.

Great save, Richard and Robert!

- Dawn Lyons