Volume 23 Issue 6 - March 2018

FEATURE
Geoffrey Sirett
GOGOL’S
OVERCOAT
REVISITED AND
REINVENTED
JENNIFER PARR
DAHLIA KATZ
There is a bubbling excitement in every conversation
I am having with members of the creative team
for The Overcoat: A Musical Tailoring, which will
have its world premiere on March 29 at Toronto’s Bluma
Appel Theatre in an epic three-way co-production
between Tapestry Opera, Canadian Stage and Vancouver
Opera.
This excitement, from all accounts, was there from the very beginning
of the project, although in the words of Tapestry’s artistic
director Michael Mori, it began “almost by accident” at Tapestry’s
annual new opera incubator, the composer librettist laboratory
(LibLab). Each summer four composers and four librettists are
brought together for the LibLab, and over the course of about ten
days go through an operatic speed dating process, each creating with
different partners four brand-new mini-operas no longer than about
five minutes in length.
At the 2014 LibLab, award-winning Canadian composer and former
LibLab participant James Rolfe was acting as mentor to that summer’s
composers when for the first time ever, a composer had to drop
out due to a musical emergency back home. Rolfe, who had been –
in Michael Mori’s words – “feeling funny about just observing and
not taking part,” now had his chance to jump into the mix, and as
chance would have it, one of the librettists he was partnered with was
two-time Governor General’s Award-winner and prolific playwright
and director, Morris Panych. They hit it off immediately.
At the LibLab, pressure is high and time is short to find good ideas
to base a new opera upon, and as Panych put it to me: “Let’s be
honest, you start to run out of ideas and I thought, hey, The Overcoat,
that could be interesting, because I’m always trying to think when
I develop those little scenarios, could this be expanded into a full
opera... and as a short story and not a novel (which are really hard to
adapt) it already has a lot of the storytelling elements that you want.”
At that point, though, he wasn’t really thinking yet about a full opera
but about a particular scene “which I thought would be a charming
scene to do with James, where the tailor and his wife measure (the
main character) Akaky for a new coat” – the overcoat of the title. The
project had begun.
To see where this new theatre piece is headed, it’s helpful to look
back at where it has already been. Gogol’s famous 1842 short story The
Overcoat, about an ordinary man whose life is turned upside down
by first acquiring and then losing a wonderful new overcoat, has
already had a long and successful theatrical life in the groundbreaking
physical theatre production created by Panych with Wendy Gorling
in 1998. Originally an experimental production for the students at
Studio 58 theatre school in Vancouver, then a full-fledged professional
production that took Vancouver and Toronto by storm, it travelled
around the country and then the world, garnering great acclaim and
many repeat engagements. The extraordinary thing about this earlier
production was that it was performed without words. The storytelling
was all done through movement, created collaboratively by the
8 | March 2018 thewholenote.com