Toronto Operetta founder takes on ‘zarzuelas’
You might say that Guillermo Silva-Marin’s life in musical theatre has come full circle with Toronto Operetta Theatre’s Canadian premiere production of Jacinto Guerrero’s Los Gavilanes (The Sparrow Hawks).
When Larry Beckwith gives the downbeat in the St. Lawrence Centre Wednesday evening (and on three succeeding nights), veteran baritone (and sometime tenor) Silva-Marin will return to the stage in the very zarzuela that introduced him to the form decades ago in San Juan as a comparative literature student at the University of Puerto Rico.
In the meantime, he has managed to combine careers as a singer (studying at the University of Toronto before performing with the Canadian Opera Company) and a stage director, and will take on both roles in this latest of a series of zarzuelas he has introduced to his adopted homeland.
Zarzuela is a Spanish word meaning bramble bush. It is also the name of King Philip IV’s hunting lodge outside Madrid, which was apparently surrounded by these bushes.
Although anxious to have entertainment at his lodge, the cashstrapped monarch was forced to settle for something less than fullscale grand opera and a new Spanish-language genre of operetta was born.
In common with Viennese operetta and Parisian opéra comique, zarzuelas typically incorporate spoken dialogue in addition to singing and dancing, and some of the greatest playwrights of Spain’s Golden Age, such as Calderon de la Barca, provided texts.
Silva-Marin acknowledges that the genre is no longer so popular as it once was (which helps explain why Placido Domingo’s announced dream of establishing a touring zarzuela company in the United States has yet to materialize), in part because of its failure to evolve with changing times.
But with a repertoire of 600 or so works, some of them by Spain’s leading composers, it nonetheless represents a treasure house of musical theatre little known in Canada (and perhaps an explanation of why the Spanish embassy in Ottawa has given Toronto Operetta Theatre a grant in support of its new production).
As for Los Gavilanes, Silva-Marin considers himself lucky to have been introduced to the zarzuela through this work because it dates from 1923, a time when sophisticated foreign musical influences clearly entered its composer’s ears.
Not that its plot breaks new ground. Toronto Operetta Theatre’s general director plays the archetypal role of a wealthy land owner who has made his fortune in the New World and has returned to his hometown in Spain in pursuit of matrimony. What distinguishes the score is a seriousness of tone and musical cosmopolitanism reflective of the post-First World War period.
It was another war, the Vietnam War (or the American War, as it is known in Vietnam), that brought Silva-Marin to Toronto in the first place, as a draft dodger subsequently pardoned in a general amnesty by president Gerald Ford. It was in Toronto that he began his musical career.
That career took a decisive turn during a run of Lehar’s The Land of Smiles at the Bayview Playhouse when the sponsoring Ontario Multicultural Theatre Association decided it wasn’t making money producing musical theatre and asked one of it lead singers if he were interested in taking over the enterprise. In short order, Toronto Operetta Theatre was born.
“I was always as interested in what went on backstage as onstage,” Silva-Marin recalls. “I used to volunteer to help paint sets and move props. It was a learning curve and, in hindsight, I see that it slowed down my solo career, but I was as happy producing as being out front.”
Indeed, the new role suited him so well that he also took over the direction of Opera in Concert (now also known as Voicebox) from its founder, Stuart Hamilton. The two organizations currently share an office and rehearsal studio.
In both instances, Silva-Marin has been responsible for broadening the city’s exposure to less well-known works: “Toronto Operetta Theatre’s board had been primarily dedicated to the Viennese school, but I realized that to survive we would have to respond to the city’s increasingly diverse population.
“So we started doing a little French repertoire, some Gilbert and Sullivan, some musicals, and the board lost its fear of the unfamiliar. Our first zarzuela was La Revoltosa (in 2003) and we did so well with it that we have continued doing others ever since.”
Silva-Marin’s approach to producing these works is to have them sung in Spanish (with surtitles) with the dialogue translated and adapted into English — conceding that the texts need some editorial help.
He credits three superstar Spanish singers, Domingo, Montserrat Caballe and Jose Carreras, with spearheading the current international revival of interest in zarzuelas but, in Canada, no one has played a larger role than the gentleman from Puerto Rico.