Opera, wildly REIMAGINED
As Toronto’s Against the Grain Theatre gets set for its most ambitious production, the opera company’s artistic director remembers where it all began: with a beer-soaked libretto
In the summer of 2011, in the main hall of the ramshackle Tranzac club in downtown Toronto, patrons milled about with pints in hand, talking and laughing in a languid humour, ready to enjoy some Puccini.
This was not the sober climate one expects of a performance of La bohème. Programmes circulated in mocked-up newspapers bearing headlines about soaring rents. Instead of reserved boxes and balconies, seating was cabaret-style: first-come, first-served. And smartphones were not only permitted — they were encouraged. There wasn’t a cummerbund or monocle in sight.
It was not that kind of opera. It was opera in a bar: four words whose irresistible intrigue would define Against the Grain Theatre long after their wildly auspicious debut. The beer-soaked libretto was sold out every night of its run.
“You didn’t have to pretend to be anything. You could be relaxed.” This is Joel Ivany, artistic director of Against the Grain and the creative radical behind the original barroom Bohème. “You could not just drink beer but spill the beer while drinking it and that would have been okay. It was really, really fun,” he recalls to me this week from Toronto, where Against the Grain’s latest production, a reimagining of Christoph Willibald Gluck’s 18th century azione teatrale classic Orfeo ed Euridice, is set to open for a three-night run at the Fleck Dance Theatre on the waterfront beginning Thursday evening. His Orphee embodies, like La bohème before it, the attitude that has distinguished Against the Grain from the start: an impulse to “break down preconceptions” of opera in 2018 — to “shake up and revitalize the art.”
Against the Grain emerged toward the end of the last decade out of a kind of desperation: it was a way to make a mark. The theatre’s story is Ivany’s, perhaps. Ivany was destined for a career in music, but came to opera relatively late. “I wasn’t brought up with opera,” he admits. “You hear about Rufus Wainwright singing arias when he was six years old, but it wasn’t part of my background in that way.” Instead Ivany was raised on the sound of the church: Salvation Army choirs, brass instruments from infancy on. Opera rather beckoned as an idea — a fanciful one. “Opera seemed like a marriage of the highest grandest form of music with the most heartbreaking stories. It was the best of both worlds,” he says. This aspirational affection soon manifested as a degree in opera from the University of Toronto, and from there an insatiable desire to break into that world.
But he needed something — some evidence of his potential. “I figured the Canadian Opera Company wouldn’t hire me right out of school,” he says. “I figured I needed a review, even if just said ‘Joel’s show sucked.’ That’s at least something you can put in a bio, or on a website. It’s proof.” Which led our ambitious would-be director to what in show business is a common refrain: “Let’s put on a show.”
The show simply happened to be unlike anything the opera world in Canada had ever seen. “When we started out we had zero dollars. Our first event was a fundraiser, and we raised about $50. We managed to get a grant from the Ontario Arts Council, and with that we did what we could: La boheme in a bar.” It was a spectacular success. “We were amazed people were so excited. It was a huge, huge hit. It went so well, and we had such a great time, that we realized we had to keep doing this.”
The boozy Boheme was never intended by Ivany expressly in defiance of convention. Indeed, for him, the charmingly shabby Tranzac was an appropriate setting for Puccini’s tale of bohemian romance — more appropriate in character than the gleaming opulence of a major opera hall. “The idea was to find venues that went with the pieces we wanted to perform or pieces that went with venues we had,” he insists.
Against the Grain doesn’t merely use bars for the sake of using bars. They staged Mozart’s comedy of manners Cosi fan tutte as a modernday reality TV show in the CBC studio that ordinarily housed the Rick Mercer Report. They mounted Le Nozze di Figaro in the Burroughs Building as a simulation wedding. For Debussy’s Pelleas et Melisande, they whisked away from rooms entirely to make it sing in the bright air of an outdoor courtyard.
Orphee is among Against the Grain’s most cleverly reconceived. Not, as one might think, for how unconventional it is, but rather for how curiously faithful it proves to the spirit of the original piece. It was written in Italian in 1762 as an effort of artistic innovation on the part of Gluck, who strove to streamline and simplify against the prevailing sound of the day. In 1774 he returned with the opera to Paris, where he was compelled to modify several aspects: as castrati were in disfavour, he changed the castrato lead to a tenor; as ballet was in vogue, he added ballet. In 1859 the opera was modified again by the composer Berlioz, to famous effect. And Ivany feels his modifications are true to that lineage. Against the Grain’s version adds an electric guitar and synthesizer. It also, memorably, adds a modern burlesque dance ensemble.
Such touches, however faithful to the source material in spirit, are liable to offend the sensibilities of purists — if only on the grounds of seeming conspicuously, even impertinently new. And over the course of his tenure as artistic director Ivany has of course fielded vociferous criticism from those who imagine the traditions of opera somehow inviolable.
He remembers to this point the conflict he saw as a child in the church, between the desire to cater to the young (with electric guitars, say) at the risk of alienating older parishioners on the one hand, to the desire to heed caution (by singing hymns the old-fashioned way) and bore the young on the other. It’s always difficult to please both, where novelty and tradition are concerned. Ultimately, Ivany wishes for “a big happy family” of an audience at the end of the day. But he reminds me that, admire what Against the Grain is doing or not, it’s nothing to get upset about. “It’s just opera. It’s not the end of the world.”
IT WENT SO WELL, AND WE HAD SUCH A GREAT TIME, THAT WE REALIZED WE HAD TO KEEP DOING THIS.