ALCINA by Handel, directed by Marshall Pynkoski, conducted by David Fallis, with Meghan Lindsay, Allyson McHardy, Wallis Giunta, Mireille Asselin, Olivier Laquerre and Kresimir Spicer. Presented by Opera Atelier at the Elgin Theatre (189 Yonge). Opens Thursday (October 23) and runs to November 1 schedule at ticketmaster.ca. $38-$181. 1-855-622-2787.
Mezzo Allyson McHardy gets to wear the pants in Handel’s baroque opera Alcina, and she’s happy about that.
She plays Ruggiero, the knight bewitched into falling in love with the enchantress Alcina, whose magical island is filled with animate and inanimate objects, former men she’s discarded as lovers.
“But don’t look for a totally masculine knight,” smiles McHardy. “The director, Marshall Pynkoski, said he cast me for my strengths, and he won’t hide the fact that I’m a woman. The costumes show my curves”
Her character isn’t the only instance of cross-dressing in the opera. Ruggiero’s fiancee, Bradamante, comes looking for her lover disguised as her own brother and spends much of the time in that male role. Only when a piece of good magic convinces Ruggiero of the spell he’s under does he turn, a bit uncomfortably, back to Bradamante.
“He’s such a fop at the start, petulant and childish. His early music is quite angular and not at all robust. As Alcina’s magic wears off and he matures – you might say he returns to reality – he becomes heroic and masculine.”
Caught between two women, Ruggiero has some difficult choices to make. He has to become literally disenchanted before he can make a proper decision.
“Alcina is his every dream come true. At one point she tells him to think of pleasure’ – what man doesn’t want to hear that? But something happens to her with Ruggiero. She actually falls in love.
“If Alcina is the ultimate date, Bradamante is the one he should marry,” smiles McHardy. “She’s going to be the one for keeps, the one he’ll build his life with, even though the relationship can’t have the excitement and thrills of his time with Alcina.”
McHardy is as fine an actor as she is a singer. She made a big impression in the Canadian Opera Company’s Roberto Devereux and Semele and Tafelmusik’s Hercules.
She admits that she’s “wired to be both a theatre person and a music person. You might say I’m like a hybrid car. It’s the story, I think, that provides the energy to sing the music well.”
Semele and Hercules are also by Handel, a favourite composer for McHardy. She even programmed part of The Messiah (which she’s singing twice this coming Christmas) for her wedding.
“Handel affects me like no one else. He’s the one I listen to for kicks. The music is expressive, romantic and devastating. It has a clarity that makes it easy to drop into the work’s emotions. If you follow his equivalent of iambic pentameter, you can’t go wrong.
“And what a joy to sing Alcina with the Tafelmusik folks, who really rock. It’s funny, when I talk about baroque music I refer to the orchestra as a band. They’re one entity, not a bunch of instrumentalists. With the cushion of sound it provides, Tafelmusik make the music easy to sing. The musicians hear what you’re doing and smoothly match up with you.”
Additional Interview Clips
The most challenging and fun parts of performing Alcina:
Working with director Marshall Pynkoski:
jonkap@nowtoronto.com
