FILUMENA RETURNS
Alberta Opera tells immigrant’s tale of tragedy
John Murrell and John Estacio have differing memories of the first meeting that led to the creation of the Alberta-set opera Filumena.
It was 17 years ago at Coyote’s Southwestern Grill in Banff. Murrell was the Banff Centre’s artistic director of theatre at the time while Estacio was the composer-in-residence at the Calgary Philharmonic and Calgary Opera.
Murrell says he first read about Florence (Filumena) Lassandro in a “stapled-together” pamphlet he found almost a decade earlier while on a trip to the Rockies. He was immediately enthralled by the tale of the young immigrant woman in Crowsnest Pass who got mixed up with bootleggers and was ultimately sent to the gallows for the murder of an RCMP constable in 1923. He tinkered with various ideas of how it could be adapted, including stage and screen treatments. He eventually decided that this sad and intriguing saga — filled with Italian immigrants, forbidden love, bloodshed, death and passion — belonged in an Italianstyle opera.
But he needed to convince both Estacio and Bob McPhee, then the Calgary Opera’s new director, over lunch at Coyote’s that afternoon.
According to Estacio, it was a slam dunk from Day 1.
“We obviously had not made the full commitment at that time,” says the composer, who is back in Calgary for Saturday’s Calgary Opera relaunch of Filumena. “But I knew, in my heart, this was the one we were going to put on stage.”
Murrell, on the other hand, left the table convinced his pitch had fizzled.
“At the time, they just said, ‘Thank you very much,’ and walked out of Coyote’s in Banff,” the playwright and librettist says with a laugh in a joint interview with Estacio. “I thought, ‘ Well, I guess it won’t be that story we’ll be doing, because they didn’t say it was. The didn’t say they hated it and they didn’t say they loved it, so that’s it.’
“For a week, I just thought I’d go back to trying to make into a play, even though it needs to be an opera. Then they called and said they wanted to go with it, that they were thrilled …
“It’s just one of the cases of how desperate we writers are for somebody’s approval.”
Whatever the level of jubilation may have been at that initial meeting, it’s doubtful Filumena was something the Calgary Opera or producing partner the Banff Centre entered into lightly. It was a massive undertaking, requiring $1.3 million in funding and three years of planning and preproduction. It was the first time the Calgary Opera commissioned an original opera and the first full-length opera to ever be set in Western Canada.
As the project progressed, Filumena did not become more manageable. Initially, the story seemed colourful but relatively tight. Filumena was the last woman hanged for murder in Alberta and one of the last women executed in Canada. She escaped boredom and a loveless arranged marriage by getting mixed up with a dashing bootlegger and fellow immigrant nicknamed Emperor Pic. She fell in love (at least in Murrell’s version of the story) with that man’s son, Steve, and ended up implicated in the murder of an RCMP constable. There’s a sensational trial — in an opera house, no less — and both Filumena and Emperor Pic, whose real name was Emilio Picariello, were convicted of murder and hanged in 1923 in Fort Saskatchewan. But according to Murrell, the scope of the vision continued to grow.
“The more John Estacio and I worked on it, the more we realized it’s really a story of the Canadian experience in that time and still continuing to our time,” Murrell says. “It’s partly the Canadian immigrant experience and partly just the experience of Western Canada and how, in the early days after this province became a province, you could make it, and what the odds were against you making it to positions of real authority, especially if you were an immigrant. We began to make it more and more a piece about the immigrant community, about the Alberta community and the Canadian experience. It’s a big opera.”
It certainly is. After 15
months of workshops at the Banff Centre, Filumena debuted at the Southern Jubilee Auditorium on Feb. 1, 2003. That’s where it will return on Saturday, kicking off a three-night run, with other showings on Feb. 8 and 10.
Directed by Kelly Robinson, the new production features soprano Lida Szkwarek as Filumena, baritone Gregory Dahl as Emilio Picariello and tenor Ernesto Ramirez as Steve.
But Murrell isn’t exaggerating when he refers to it as a “big opera.” It features 12 solo singing roles, a chorus of between 30 and 40, 11 supernumerary actors, seven children and a large orchestra.
“It’s terrifically exciting, coming from spoken theatre as I do where a big cast is seven to 10 people, to look up on that stage and down into the orchestra pit and see literally over 100 people involved in presenting this opera,” he says.
In 2003, the audience response for Filumena was nothing short of rapturous, with crowds offering “shouts of approval — not just good healthy applause,” Murrell says. Later performances at the Banff Centre, Edmonton Opera and the National Arts Centre in Ottawa were also well received.
Since Filumena, Murrell and Estacio have worked on two more operas: Frobisher in 2007 and Lillian Alling in 2010.
But given the grand scale of the production, it’s not only those who create and commission new works that need to take a leap of faith. Relaunching contemporary operas also takes a company with vision and ambition and an appetite for risk-taking.
“We’ve had producers come up to us and say, ‘I’d really love to produce Filumena or one of the other operas, but we’re having financial concern,’ or ‘ We’re not sure if the community is ready for it,’ or ‘ We did a contemporary work and lost a lot of money and are shy to do another one,’ ” Estacio says.
“There’s always a reason and we can’t control any of that, unfortunately. That’s a hard lesson that we’ve learned, that the world has not beat a path to our door to produce Filumena right away. It’s had some productions in Canada, but she’s been sleeping 12 years since the last production in Edmonton.”
Still, Estacio and Murrell are convinced the opera has a sturdy blueprint and its story, while set in a very specific era and place, has elements that stand the test of time.
“I think today with the way things are with new people coming to Canada, there’s always fingers pointing and people not wanting new immigrants to come to this land,” Estacio says. “Well, that’s the situation in the early 1900s as well for Filumena, and her family and that continues, unfortunately, today, and it’s represented in this piece.”