Dazzling visuals and voices revive Turandot MUSIC

TURANDOT

Vancouver Opera’s clever new 2

production of Turandot offers up such stylized spectacle that you could almost enjoy it with earplugs in. You wouldn’t want to do that, though, because the lush orchestrations and powerful leads make equal magic.

By creating a mythical, pastichehappy version of “legendary Peking”, the Montreal creative team of director Renaud Doucet and set and costume designer André Barbe avoid the pitfalls of the kitschy, dated “Orientalism” of composer Giacomo Puccini’s time. Instead, they embrace the mashedup, multicultural roots of Turandot, a Persian folk tale translated into French and German before it was adapted by an Italian librettist with a penchant for commedia dell’arte.

In this mounting, royal advisers Ping, Pang, and Pong circumvent racial stereotype by becoming fantastical, culture-crossing clowns: they wear gondolier and top hats, with long johns under their neon-hued silk robes and martini shakers hidden in their attendants’ backpacks. The stage plays with circles upon circles (symbols of the cycle of life and death), the focal point a dramatic raked crescent of lustrous bronze topped by an ornately carved red arch. Blood drips down the steps, and expressionistic reliefs of chopped-off heads loom large on poles. Characters wear exaggerated headdresses, the emperor lording it over everyone in a colossal antlerlike contraption.

The stage gradually opens into ever more elaborate portals and cells, making it a giant puzzle box for the chorus of 52. In the opening scene, the reddressed support cast writhes up from a central pit, looking like Dante’s Inferno reimagined by German expressionist filmmaker Robert Wiene.

This is the first time VO has staged Turandot in 12 years and it’s worth the wait. Doucet and Barbe have used these sets before—they’re jointly owned by opera companies from Minnesota to Philadelphia. You can see the depth of thought that has gone into their interpretation of a work that stretches credibility, especially in its sudden, romantic happy ending. (For the first time, VO is also using Chinese surtitles alongside its English ones.)

The duo’s innovation goes beyond the striking visuals. They’ve striven to humanize the often impenetrable characters. Turandot is a princess who beheads opponents, including any suitors who can’t answer her three riddles. Calaf falls hard for her—during an execution, of all things—and submits himself to the riddle session. What he can’t see right in front of him is that his father’s devoted servant, Liù, loves him.

Doucet brings some memorable new touches to the story. The princess appears to hesitate before ordering a beheading, and she throws herself into Calaf’s arms instead of waiting for him to force himself upon her in the final act. The prolonged silence as the chorus leaves the stage after Liù’s demise is epically moving.

All the leads were debuting in their roles on opening night, and all excelled. Rising Argentine tenor Marcelo Puente brought passion and poetry to his physically expressive Calaf, eliciting cheers with a clarion “Nessun dorma”.

As Liù, Marianne Fiset added just the right amount of sweetness to her mesmerizing pianissimo moments, yet you could feel her pain during a torture scene. And Amber Wagner’s Turandot was formidable, adding the psychological depth of another Wagner—richard, of course—to her arias. You’ll marvel at the showstopping volume and warmth she musters in the third act of her marathon.

Under the baton of Jacques Lacombe, the Vancouver Opera Orchestra embraces the complex score, highlighting the almost cinematic touches of a composer who was exploring expressionism in his final work.

The chorus resounds, as it should, and Doucet animates the tableaux with plenty of dance.

The extended opening-night standing O said it all. This is a Turandot to please the eyes, brain, and ears—a bold vision that helps this old warhorse speak to new audiences.

> JANET SMITH

Turandot.

Starring Harry Dean Stanton. Rated PG

The opening credits tell us 2

that “Harry Dean Stanton is Lucky,” the yellow typeface recalling an old western, the star’s thin grey face framed inside a blazing blue sky. Here’s our first cue that actor and character will converge over the course of this film’s 90 minutes, in the second-to-last movie Stanton shot before dying on September 15, and one of only a handful of starring roles the inveterate scene-stealer was given in a 60-year career.

A documentary by Rory Kennedy. Rated PG

The subject of this mesmerizing 2 surf documentary isn’t the most ingratiating dude around. But one of the most enduring features of relentless innovator Laird Hamilton is how few fucks he gives about what we think of him. That turns out to be central to his reality, which consists of the biggest, baddest waves that humans have ever tackled.

Hamilton grew up in Hawaii with his free-spirit mother (who’s no longer with us) and adoptive father, surfing star Bill Hamilton (who is). He started riding swells in utero, he claims, and is famous within the surfing ionosphere for his almost insane courage. Laird says he has a “fear defect” that keeps him on the edge of danger without always noticing it, but he’s not better known to the general public because he has never competed professionally. He’s in competition

Starring Douglas Booth. Rated PG

Lovingly is for sure the way Loving 2 Vincent was created. It took seven years to complete this look at Dutch painter Vincent van Gogh’s final days, and their aftermath, in a rural Paris suburb. Making their feature-directing debut together, Poland’s Dorota Kobiela and the U.K.’S Hugh Welchman started by filming live actors against green screens, and then had hundreds of animators and technicians in several countries add layers of oil-paint colour and texture to the footage, creating the impression of the artist’s famously thick brush strokes.

They use many of his best-known paintings as starting points, and as backgrounds or transitions, for their own story, which is much less inspiring than the art. For some reason, they focus on the mildly nebulous circumstances of van Gogh’s suicide at age 37, in 1890. Douglas Booth (currently seen in The Limehouse Golem) plays Armand Roulin, a hard-drinking dandy in a yellow jacket who is tasked with delivering a posthumous letter by his dad, the muttonchop-whiskered postmaster (Chris O’dowd) of Arles, in southern France, where the painter found his swirly, postimpressionist style.

Van Gogh painted father and son, who probably didn’t have accents quite as divergent as Booth’s Cockney twang and O’dowd’s Irish brogue. Among latter-day friends and antagonists of the red-bearded artist, there’s no effort to coordinate the speaking or acting styles of, say, Brooklyn’s Saoirse Ronan and The Hobbit’s Aidan Turner—both from Ireland—and those of Brits Helen Mccrory (Penny Dreadful) and Jerome Flynn (Game of Thrones). Flynn plays Dr. Gachet, a father figure with an ambiguous role in the manic ups and downs of the painter and his sickly younger brother, Theo.

Both van Goghs are seen, played by Polish actors, in black-and-white flashbacks that are more realistically treated than the colourful “present”. The mystery Armand pursues never fully engages, and the clunky script sometimes takes you out of the period. But a visual approach that sounds, on paper, like a thin gimmick is consistently compelling on-screen—sometimes breathtakingly so. Be sure to stay for the credits, to catch photos and sketches of the real-life characters, and to

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A documentary by Frederick Wiseman. Rating unavailable

Documentary pioneer Frederick 2

Wiseman is not for everyone. But he is for all time. This unobtrusive New Englander has made almost 50 films in as many years, usually as his own lensman, capturing the fly-onthe-wall stuff of ordinary—and sometimes extraordinary—life. Unnarrated vérité movies like 1969’s High School and 1997’s Public Housing may have helped influence the rise of reality TV. Still going strong at nearly 88, Wiseman would be unlikely to recognize his interests coinciding with those of any commercial producers.

He finds a worthy subject in the New York Public Library, one that merits this film’s three-and-a-quarter-hour length. Aside from its massive main building, with those famous stone lions, at Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street, the NYPL employs thousands of people at 87 branches, displaying more than 50 million books, documents, photographs, and other artifacts (including the real-life toys of Winnie-the-pooh’s Christopher Robin).

Its geography is as dense and welltrafficked as that of any major airport, although most travel is done by mind, and feet. Wiseman certainly wore out his shoe leather at various outposts, especially those in poorer boroughs, where recent infusions of cash (the library functions with a roughly even mix of private and public funding) have enabled the institution to engage with families previously deprived of resources. There’s considerable time spent at the lively Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, an extension in Harlem.

Still, much of the film is taken up within the marble halls of the main branch, with its massive reading rooms, changing displays, and vast archives. There are public visits with well-known figures, generally discussing their new books, and these include Ta-nehisi Coates, Patti Smith, and Elvis Costello—with the last-named sharing rare footage of his jazz-singing dad attempting to rock out in the early ’60s on British TV.

We visit rooms devoted to recording audiobooks for the blind, and there is also training in using Braille machines and sign-language performance at theatrical events. And, of course, meetings for the tedious but necessary efforts of administrators to guide such a gigantic ship. Through it all, there’s the awareness that such institutions operate at the mercy of the elite; they generally began as noblesse oblige gestures by robber barons, after all. But this only underlines the precious, and increasingly tenuous, nature of knowledge itself.

> KEN EISNER

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Tegan Quinn sounds off on the things that enquiring minds want to know.