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Opera To Go

OPERA TO GO a quintet of short operas (Tapestry New Opera). At the Fermenting Cellar, Distillery District (55 Mill). Thursday-Friday (March 25-26) at 8 pm. $40, $20 stu/arts worker. 416-537-6066. See listing. Rating: NNN


Opera To Go, a regular series produced by Tapestry New Opera Works, is a great way to be introduced to opera.

This year, the company’s 30th anniversary, Tapestry’s brought back five brief works created in earlier series.

The operas, each running15 minutes or so, aren’t all of equal weight. Sometimes one part of the operatic equation – either text or music – works better than the other. Jeffrey Ryan’s haunting score for The Laurels, in which a mysterious man hunts a woman in a park late at night – or are the roles of hunter and hunted reversed? – is more memorable than Michael Lewis MacLennan’s text.

The opposite is true of Ashlike On The Cradle Of The Wind, a memory-filled meditation on the spread of HIV. Jill Battson’s poetic libretto, filled with shards of imagery, is wonderfully evocative, while Andrew Staniland’s music is less engaging.

There’s a better balance in Rosa, by librettist Camyar Chai and composer James Rolfe, in which a hooker meets a john who reminds her of her past.

A pair of entertaining comic works balance these three intense pieces. Librettist Mark Brownell and composer Chan Ka Nin’s Ice Time looks at the agony of sports defeat in the confrontation between a young skater and the coach – a former ice queen – who’s been pushing her for years. Librettist Lisa Codrington and composer Kevin Morse’s The Colony aims totally for laughs as a queen ant and one of her minions go head to head with an exterminator who won’t say die…except to insects and vermin.

If some of the short pieces are uneven, the quality of their presentation is always high, thanks to music director Wayne Strongman, director Tom Diamond and a quartet of fine actor/singers (soprano Xin Wang, mezzo Krisztina Szabó, tenor Keith Klassen and baritone Peter McGillivray), who offer varied and uniformly strong characterizations.

Each of the operas is staged in a different section of the Distillery District’s cavernous Fermenting Cellar, and it’s a credit to the singers that though surtitles are used, you rarely need them to understand the words. Set and costume designer Julia Tribe has sometimes wrapped, sometimes draped the room’s metal columns in plastic, which provides lighting designer Kimberly Purtell a wide variety of possibilities, depending on whether illumination is projected onto the plastic or shone from behind it.[rssbreak]

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