PUPPET OPERA
Bold show tackles homelessness
When Ottawa guitarist Roddy Ellias was studying classical composition at the University of Ottawa’s music department in the 1980s, he moved into an apartment across the street from the Ottawa Mission in Sandy Hill.
“I got to know them,” Ellias says of the homeless men who were his neighbours. “I saw that some had regular, average lives at some point. … Sometimes something went wrong.”
Around the same time, Ellias was struck by a topic that had come up in his ethnomusicology course — the traditions of puppet theatre in such far-flung locales as Japan and Bali. “I was really taken by that — the power, the quality of the puppets,” Ellias says.
Jumping forward three decades, Ellias has pulled together an ambitious and unique new work that combines those two aspects from his student days. He’s tapped his concern for the homeless to provide the subject matter for a puppet opera called Sleeping Rough, which debuts Tuesday, July 10 at the Arts Court Theatre as part of Music and Beyond, and which will play there the following two nights.
For Ellias, an eclectic sort who has worked as a performer, composer and educator in the jazz and classical worlds, the project represents a giant creative leap that’s required untold hours — he cancelled a half-dozen jazz gigs last month to complete the opera’s finishing touches — and quite a few dollars to bring to the stage.
The work involves four acclaimed singers — folk singersongwriter Ian Tamblyn, jazz star Kellylee Evans, classical soprano Hélène Brunet and Toronto-based indie-jazz singer Felicity Williams — supported by 12 musicians. Tamblyn plays Ted, a homeless man, Williams plays a young woman who meets him, Brunet plays the woman’s mother, and Evans is a chorus-like figure commenting on the proceedings. All are embodied by puppets created by Almonte puppeteer Noreen Young, founder of the long-running Puppets Up! International Puppet Festival.
“I think it was one of the hardest things I’ve had to do,” says Ellias. He adds that while he’s written a lot of music for voice, this project
was his first crack at writing a fullfledged opera.
Ellias was fortunate to have a found a champion in Music and Beyond’s artistic and executive director, Julian Armour, even if Armour kids: “Anytime someone uses the word ‘opera’ to me, I’m ready to walk the other way, it’s just so expensive. … Ticket sales won’t even come close to covering the costs.”
Still, Armour says he was ready early on to support Ellias’s project.
“It’s a pretty bold leap to be writing an opera, but he’s taken to it with a long-term vision. Roddy approached in exactly the right way.”
Last year, Music and Beyond presented a scaled-down performance of two arias from Sleeping Rough, and Ellias was able to use videos from that concert to apply for grants to fund the full project. He’s received a total of $75,000 from the City of Ottawa, Ontario Arts Council and Canada Council for the Arts. Before Ellias composed a note, there needed to be words — and indeed, a story — that he would set to music. The task of writing the libretto (the opera’s text) fell to Ottawa poet and author Sandra Nicholls — who just happens to be Ellias’s wife.
“I was intimidated,” Nicholls says, calling the libretto “a totally different animal” from her past artistic writing. “It’s got to work musically, but it’s got to work to tell the story at the same time,” she says.
In the end, she was able to write the 35-page libretto at a two-day silent retreat.
Then, it was Ellias’s turn to set his wife’s words to music. For the first step, he wrote nothing but melodies for “70 to 75 minutes of solid music,” he says. Then he harmonized his material, and finally he orchestrated what he had written for his chosen instruments, keeping the music “as transparent and simple as possible. I didn’t want the orchestration to muddy the voices.”
The music, he says, “is not strictly classical, it’s not jazz.” It does, however, involve musicians and singers from both genres, and there is a bit of improvising built into the music.
During the writing of the music, sometimes there needed to be tweaks of Nicholls’s text to make words line up with her husband’s melodies. Both say the collaborations went smoothly. “We work great together. We always have,” says Ellias, pointing out that Nicholls had previously written lyrics for some of his compositions. “We’re both flexible. I don’t think we have an ego.”
It could detract from the impact of Sleeping Rough to say anything further about its plot or characters, except to note that it is a tragedy. “I’d hoped for a note of positive optimism in the end, but Roddy insisted this was opera and that was that,” Nicholls says.
Although the opera has yet to debut, Ellias is casting ahead to ponder other performance opportunities, perhaps at chamber music festivals or puppet festivals.
Indeed, even though Sleeping Rough isn’t yet behind him, Ellias is looking ahead to writing another puppet opera.
“I want to do another one. There’s so much potential,” he says.