MARIA STUARDA by Gaetano Donizetti, directed by Stephen Lawless, conducted by Antony Walker (Canadian Opera Company). At the Four Seasons Centre (145 Queen West). Runs to May 30, May 4, 10, 13, 22, 26 and 28 at 7:30 pm, May 30 at 2 pm. $62-$292, some rush. 416-363-8231. See listing. Rating: NNN
If Donizetti’s opera Maria Stuarda had a subtitle, it would be When Queens Collide.
Like several other writers, Donizetti creates a fictional, charged meeting between Queen Elizabeth I and Mary Stuart (Mary Queen of Scots), the cousin she eventually sent to her death. In addition to the political rivalry between the monarchs, he adds a romantic triangle that involves Robert, Earl of Leicester.
The Canadian Opera Company production is long on musical strengths, shorter on dramatic ones. Conductor Antony Walker leads a taut but lyrical reading of the score, with Serena Farnocchia’s Maria radiant and creamy voiced from her first entrance. Alexandrina Pendatchanska has a voice that’s more pinched her Elizabeth takes time to warm up, but the confrontation between the two women had the necessary sparks.
Patrick Carfizzi’s Talbot is the most impressive male singer, especially in his duet with the doomed Maria, in which, as a crypto-Catholic in a Protestant country, he gives Communion to the despondent woman. Weston Hurt’s Cecil, Elizabeth’s advisor, is properly gruff, but Eric Cutler, though singing well in soft passages, gives Leicester some strained high notes and little personality.
The real problems with the show are directorial. Director Stephen Lawless and his designer, Benoît Dugardyn, start with the clever idea of setting the action in a several-tiered Elizabethan theatre, emphasizing the distinction between the characters’ public and private worlds. The chorus becomes spectators of the drama curtains sometimes hide the more personal moments from them.
Thus at the start of the opera, the chorus waits not just for their queen to appear but also for the entrance of the drama’s lead actor, Elizabeth. But soon the pulling back and forth of curtains becomes tedious. Just as awkwardly, the two-worlds view and its potential for dramatic nuance isn’t always followed through logically.
The COC production is the first fully staged Canadian production of Maria Stuarda too bad all the show’s elements aren’t equally strong.
jonkap@nowtoronto.com [rssbreak]
