What Toronto and Kansas City have in common
KANSAS CITY, MO.— When the curtain goes up in Toronto’s Four Seasons Centre Saturday night on the Canadian Opera Company’s production of Peter Grimes, the occasion will have some interesting parallels with recent events in Kansas City.
For it was in the western Missouri metropolis a couple of weeks ago that the local opera company brought to its stage a work specifically chosen by a hometown mezzosoprano superstar as a personal vehicle.
Now it may be true that, unlike Joyce DiDonato, Canada’s superstar tenor, Ben Heppner was born and raised elsewhere — in British Columbia, actually — but he is very much regarded as a local hero in Southern Ontario now. It was similarly his choice to sing the title role in arguably Benjamin Britten’s greatest opera, during the centennial year of the English composer’s birth.
Locally connected or not, internationally celebrated singers such as Heppner and DiDonato are not always affordable by regional companies, but in the case of both Kansas City and Toronto the superstars could be offered the inducement of a showcase in one of the finest opera houses built anywhere within the past decade.
Ironically, the architect of Kansas City’s Muriel Kauffman Theatre, Moshe Safdie, was the same architect who designed the ballet-opera house slated to be built in Toronto at the corner of Bay and Wellesley Sts. back in the 1980s.
The Bay-Wellesley project proved too rich for Ontario’s then new NDP government and, without massive government support, it remained unbuilt. By way of contrast, the 1,800-seat Muriel Kauffman Theatre and the Kauffman Centre for the Performing Arts as a whole (the other component being the 1,600seat Helzberg Hall) was built completely, save for an underground parking garage, without govern- ment money.
Toronto did finally manage to build an opera house, the much scaled-down, Jack Diamond-designed Four Seasons Centre.
It is not the iconic building Safdie erected two years ago in Kansas City, but it has proven functionally admirable.
The Canadian Opera Company is a bigger enterprise than Lyric Opera of Kansas City so Peter Grimes with Heppner can be said to represent less of a mountain to climb than Bellini’s The Capulets and the Montagues with DiDonato.
What Deborah Sandler, Lyric Opera’s new general director, nevertheless recognized were the twin challenges of operating in a world class house and surrounding a world-class star with a production worthy of her.
Locally connected or not, internationally celebrated singers such as Ben Heppner and Joyce DiDonato are not always affordable by regional companies
Anyone who remembers the decades the Canadian Opera Company spent in the O’Keefe (now Sony) Centre will be aware of the catalytic effect the Four Seasons Centre has had on the company.
As someone who also remembers the old days of Kansas City’s company in its makeshift former home, I can testify to the equally transformative impact the Muriel Kauffman Theatre has had on Lyric Opera.
Aspiring to new standards has also led Lyric Opera to invest millions in the renovation of three connected warehouse buildings and the erection of an adjacent administrative headquarters to create a production facility known as Lyric Opera Centre.
Like the Canadian Opera Company’s Tanenbaum Centre, this new downtown headquarters houses not only rehearsal facilities but a second stage for the presentation of intimate and experimental work.
Sandler is quick to point out that if opera is to remain relevant, it needs to expand its horizons, enrich its repertory and attract a broader audience. Together, the Kauffman Theatre and Lyric Opera Centre represent powerful tools, similar to the COC’s, to achieve these goals. And speaking of relevance, when DiDonato expressed her wish to sing Romeo in Bellini’s opera, Sandler turned to Kevin Newbury, a director interested in giving the old Romeo and Juliet tale a contemporary feel. Set not in Renaissance Verona but in a “vaguely present-day underground bunker,” with gas masks, air-raid sirens and a general feeling of claustrophobia, the opera became in Victoria Tzykun’s design much more about warring families than simply a tragic love story. Whether or not one likes this kind of updating, there was no denying the impressive level of resources poured into the production, beginning with the pairing of DiDonato’s Romeo with the soprano Juliet of Nicole Cabell.
The Capulets and
I haven’t heard two female voices blend more beautifully since the great days of Joan Sutherland and Marilyn Horne.
Kansas City’s audience knew what it had heard, jumping up at the opera’s conclusion to a standing ovation, to which DiDonato responded by throwing her arms into the air like a victorious prize fighter.
Opera can generate this kind of response when the conditions are right. Like Toronto, Kansas City can now offer those conditions. littler@williamlittler.com