ARTS Merry Widow is a lavish escape
ACCLAIMED DRAMA Nov. 8 – 17, 2018 Studio B Janet Smith MUSIC
dVANCOUVER OPERA general director Kim Gaynor pretty much nailed it when she said, before the opening-night performance of The Merry Widow, that it was the “perfect antidote to today’s voting procedures”.
Yes, the drab school and community-centre gymnasiums where thousands of Vancouverites stood in line are about as far as you can get from the lavish, glittering ballrooms of the Austro-hungarian Empire—or at least from its embassy and expats in fin-de-siècle Paris.
In this Vancouver Opera production helmed by veteran stage director Kelly Robinson, the 1905 work is finely polished, with leads whose sparkling singing is mostly matched by nuanced comedic acting.
The lush art-nouveau sets, from Utah Opera, envelop the action in Klimt-like screen prosceniums. In the first ballroom act, guests in black and white swirl against lavender hues.
Vancouver choreographer Joshua Beamish sends dancers waltzing and can-canning throughout, most memorably when the bamboozled men in the show, bemoaning women, pull off their own slapstick kick line.
How much charm you find in all this may depend on how able you are to transport yourself to another time and place. It’s been 28 years since VO last staged this operetta, and that may be in part due to the challenges of making it relevant to now. High-class Austro-hungarian society was mannered, and so The Merry Widow can feel affected today—especially in the spoken sections.
The plot centres on Hanna Glawari, a widow who’s inherited a vast fortune that every man in Paris, and her own fictional home country of tiny Pontevedro, wants to get his hands on. The only one she wants to marry is a former beau, Count Danilo, but neither will admit they love the other. Their story is played off the ingénue Valencienne, who’s married to an unsuspecting old ambassador, but is giving in to the flirtations of Camille.
Smartly, director Robinson emphasizes Hanna’s empowerment. The title character gleefully controls her own fate. And gifted soprano Lucia Cesaroni gives her a strength and sass that go a long way to making the silliness feel more modern. She also turns the “Vilja Song” into a lustrous gem.
Tenor John Cudia makes a dashing Danilo, even hinting at a bit of vulnerability behind his upper-crust exterior.
Richard Suart’s doddery ambassador, Baron Mirko Zeta, is hilariously naive about his wife’s dalliances. And John Tessier as Camille and Sasha Djihanian as Valencienne find an authentic sweetness in their playful duets about love.
Young conducting star Wade Stare makes all of this flow like Champagne, bringing a lilt and light touch.
The opera won over its audience, earning a standing O. After a long day of voting, people were ready to join the waltz.
dHOW NERVE-RACKING is it watching rope-free rock climber Alex Honnold hang by his fingertips, a kilometre up the sheer granite face of Yosemite National Park’s El Capitan?
As shown repeatedly in the riveting new documentary Free Solo, his own cameraman—who’s standing on the valley floor with a telephoto lens and, more importantly, is an accomplished climber himself—is too freaked out to watch through the viewfinder.
Honnold’s crazy free climb up the Earth’s most impressive wall is shot dizzyingly from above, from far below, and—most spectacularly—in closeup, by expert climber-cameramen (with ropes). But it’s not just scenes like these, breaking new ground in outdoor shooting, that make Free Solo one of the best in its genre.
Dazzling footage of the human gecko scrambling up walls from Morocco’s limestone cliffs to Utah’s pink-streaked Moonlight Buttress in preparation for his, frankly, semisuicidal El Capitan bid is just the start here. What makes the film so remarkable is that maverick mountaineering directors Jimmy Chin and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi (who made the Himalayan climbing doc Meru) find just as much transfixing material in the intimate portrait of their flawed hero.
When we meet Honnold, he is already a rock-climbing star, attending book signings, earning sponsorships, making the cover of National Geographic, and travelling the world. However, something is a little off. He lives in a van. He eats dinner with the same spatula he fries his mishmash of food up with, straight out of the pan. We learn that a lonely childhood and a distant father drew him to solo climbing. And most fascinatingly, we watch this lifelong loner try to form a lasting relationship with a woman who may just win the prize for being the most positive, patient, supportive girlfriend on the planet. (“He’s a weird dude and I find it interesting.”)
This extreme athlete appears to feel no fear, leading one researcher to scan his brain, with even more astounding results in the film.
Whatever the biology behind it, Honnold is obsessively, inescapably driven to make his record-setting El Capitan free climb—despite all the warnings we hear from pro rock climbers and at least one failed attempt. Adding to the ever-building tension is the fact that the very presence of cameras could throw off Honnold’s concentration and kill him.
The feeling of stomach-churning vertigo builds relentlessly in the final act, the El Capitan climb as cathartic for Honnold as it is harrowing for us to watch—and, apparently, for his crew to shoot.
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