Volume 24 Issue 7 - April 2019

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“a thrilling cast
of Canada’s
finest singers”
—OPERA CANADA
Dion Mazerolle, featured in Shakespeare’s Criminal
TOT goes tried and true
This year even Toronto Operetta Theatre finishes its season with the
tried and true – in this case Franz Lehár’sThe Merry Widow (1905),
the greatest of all Silver Age operettas. The opera runs April 24 to 28
and features Lucia Cesaroni in the title role, Michael Nyby as Count
Danilo, Daniela Agostino as Valencienne and Gregory Finney as Baron
Zeta. Larry Beckwith conducts the TOT Ensemble and Guillermo
Silva-Marin directs.
And finally … something new
Despite this plethora of familiar works, April does offer one new
opera and one important but seldom-seen opera. The new opera is
Shakespeare’s Criminal by Dustin Peters to a libretto by Sky Gilbert.
Orpheus Productions will give the chamber piece three workshop
performances at Factory Theatre from April 26 to 28.
The magic realist work, set in the present, plays with the notion that
Shakespeare was gay, a view some hold since many of Shakespeare’s
sonnets are addressed to a young man. Other sonnets are addressed
to an unknown woman whom critics have dubbed the “Dark Lady
of the Sonnets.” In Shakespeare’s Criminal, an older male poet
named Shakespeare is unable to admit that he is homosexual. Instead
he hides his attraction for men in the eloquent language of the
sonnets for which he is much esteemed. He meets a beautiful young
HIV-positive man to whom he finds himself attracted, but whom he
resists. Enter a wild, fierce voyeur who urges the older poet to fall
in love with the young man and bed him. The woman is so persuasive
that it seems the older closeted poet will succumb, but at the last
moment he cannot bring himself to risk his reputation. In revenge,
the woman turns the old poet into a tree – a gender-reversed image
of what the river god Peneus does in Ovid’s Metamorphoses to his
daughter Daphne to preserve her chastity.
Dustin Peters is a Toronto-based composer whose works range
from concert and chamber music to film scores and pieces for voice
and dance. Sky Gilbert is an award-winning writer, director, filmmaker
and professor. His many critically acclaimed plays have been
performed in theatres worldwide. Guernica will publish his investigation
of Shakespeare’s rhetoric, Shakespeare: Beyond Science, later
this year.
The opera features mezzo-soprano Marion Newman, baritone Dion
Mazerolle and actor Nathaniel Bacon. The structure of Shakespeare’s
Criminal is inspired by musicologist Ellen T. Harris’s notion that male
composers were able to ground the emotional core of their operas
through the wild female voice (something which eventually led to
the tragic Romantic heroines of Verdi and Puccini). Presented operain-concert
style, Shakespeare’s Criminal raises many questions
including, “Why do gay men often gravitate towards friendships with
women and vice versa?” Peters is music director of the accompanying
string quartet and Gilbert directs.
MOZART
IDOMENEO
with MEASHA
BRUEGGERGOSMAN
APRIL 4–13
Ed Mirvish Theatre
TICKETS FROM $39!
OPERAATELIER.COM
Season Presenting Sponsor
Season Underwriter
Season Supported by
Photo by
BRUCE ZINGER
thewholenote.com April 2019 | 35