Perhaps inspired by the trials of his conflicted protagonist, director Max Zidel ambitiously attacks Aeschylus’ three-part tragedy in The Oresteia Rewritten, now on at Players’ Theatre. The result of his efforts: a powerful and unexpectedly fast-paced reproduction full of sound and fury.

From early on in the play it is clear that trying to accurately trace a detailed plot, let alone three, from this feverish production is a fool’s errand. As a result. the world we enter in the third-floor orifice of the Shatner Building is constantly shifting, and full of in-your-face conflict.

As the main character, Orestes, wrestles with classic tragedian struggles (murdered parents, political allegiances, and arduous journeys), the audience is beckoned away from the epic hero’s journey and invited to participate in the mental process of his struggle. As the chorus chants eerily in unison, we are fully transported to the world of this disturbed psyche.

Zidel and musical director James Campbell use the classical palette through powerful imagery and pulsating musical chorus-to-character back-and-forth to explore how we wrestle with ourselves and our choices. Carrying the burden of these choices, Orestes (David Armstrong) is able to capture and hold the audience’s attention because he is so completely self-possessed on stage. He reacts spontaneously and subtly to the familial conflict surrounding him and eventually to the conflicting voices of “The Furies” in his maddened mind.

The bloody encounters between Orestes’s parents, King Agamemnon and his wife Clytemnestra, are conveyed solidly by Cam Oram and Jamie Munro, respectively. As their disputes heat up in the first act, Munro takes control of her part with a rigid and unforgiving physicality. Hatef Mottaghi plays a pensive and cleverly probing Menelaus, Agamemnon’s brother and advisor, who at times steals the stage from his sibling.

When the re-written parts of the dialogue get a little bit too Disney, with lines like, “I don’t know what love means anymore,” the viewer can still rely on the frantic and spontaneous actions of the Chorus — functioning as a “conscience posse” for Orestes—to bring us back to the lively inner conflict around which the play revolves. Notable among the chorus is Emily Murphy, who is able to deliver gestures that border hauntingly on epileptic.   

Feathers, unkempt hair, and dark, other-worldly makeup give the chorus a folklore quality that helps the show break away from its classical origins and into more mythical, timeless territory. Driving many scenes into this territory is the prophesying Oracle played by Lerato Islam. Islam is stunning in a shimmering dress and vibrant shawl, and commands the stage with a visceral voice.

The set functions well in stationary scenes, but in a show that is meant to transport us to radically different environments, it sometimes has a cumbersome quality. Similarly, the lighting in the small theatre works very well at casting powerful shadows when the action is focused, but struggles to define the more mobile scenes. One example of this occurs when Orestes and his sister Electra (played youthfully and convincingly by Annie MacKay) revisit their convoluted past, their father’s grave symbolically lit from above at centre stage.When the production comes together in all its elements, which it does brilliantly and miraculously at times, we can see the heavy backdrop of the set as a sort of mythic and powerful stomping ground.

The Oresteia Rewritten grapples with the daunting challenges of combining ancient and modern dialogue, staging an amphitheatre-sized epic in a small black box theatre and, most obviously, condensing three plays into one that runs for an hour and a half long. The product is very satisfying. While Zidel may not have been looking to create a faithful representation of the tragic trilogy, he clearly had good reasons for grounding his hyper-creative visions in the work of the Greeks. Bring a friend and a flask, because it may be the only chance you’ve got hear the word “fuck” belted out of the ancient house of Atreus.

The Oresteia Rewritten runs at Player’s Theatre January 26-29.

Holly Stewart

Though it usually operates on a smaller scale, this week Opera McGill will debut a big-budget, big-cast version of what is arguably the world’s biggest-name opera: Giacomo Puccini’s La Bohème.

“It’s the world’s favourite opera, in some way,” says Patrick Hansen, the director of McGill’s Opera Studies program. “A lot of people would probably say it’s numero uno.”

Hansen’s relationship with the opera goes back to the beginning of his 30-year career, in which he has performed or viewed a scene or an entire production of the performance.

First performed in 1896, La Bohème is about bohemians in love in 1830s Paris. Part of the reason for its enduring popularity is its ability to speak to young people.

“The thing that really makes Bohème powerful is that it’s a story about young people: artists, musicians, painters, philosophers—you know, students,” Hansen says. “We could have [set] this in the McGill Ghetto. It would have been easy.”

Unlike most operas, La Bohème has made a number of leaps from the opera house into popular culture. Australian director Baz Luhrmann started his career with an updated production of it, and later reused parts of the sets in his Moulin Rouge! The music appeared in the 1987 romantic comedy Moonstruck, and the Broadway musical Rent is based on the story, even borrowing the names of the characters.

Philippe Sly, who will play Marcello, one of the two male leads, on January 26 and 29, said that he found a lot of common ground with his character.

“[Co-star Elias Berberian] and I decided we’re just going to play ourselves, have a good time on stage, and we know that will resonate quite profoundly,” he said.

In March, Sly will go to New York to compete with a few dozen other singers (selected from a pool of around 2,000) at the Metropolitan Opera House’s National Council Auditions contest.  

Though Hansen has done Bohème for 30 years, this particular production has some new dimensions. Most significantly, the orchestra will be on the stage as opposed to in the pit, which is too small for a full ensemble. Although that might sound trivial, it means big changes for the show’s basic dynamics.

“Everything about the production is about how to technically make that happen,” said Hansen.

The production will therefore feature some significant technical changes, the most important being that performers will interact with the conductor via screens stage right, stage left, and in front of the stage. “La Bohème via Skype, in a weird way,” Hansen said.

Though the scheme creates some challenges for the singers and musicians, in other senses Hansen said that it was the “easiest production [he] had ever directed,” because the cast is talented and because the script is easy to stage.

“The thing that’s great about Bohème is that there’s not a wasted moment. It’s so compact and so pithy,” he said.  “It’s almost made for ADHD folks … There’s not a moment where you sit there and go ‘Gosh, this has been going on for a while,’ because there’s always a new character, there’s always something happening.”

When asked for a final word on his show, Hansen did not hide his confidence.

“I can’t imagine a better production being done,” he said. “I just think that this is simply not to be missed. If [students] ever have thought for a moment, ‘I’m at university, I really ought to be taking in an opera for once in my life,’ they would come and actually be surprised at how amazing it is, how ingenious it is, and they might get hooked on it.”

La Bohème runs Jan. 26, 28, 29, 30, 7:30 p.m. at Pollack Hall.  Tickets are $22. 

Opera of Montreal

Shortly after the curtain rises on Opera of Montreal’s production of Werther, a young boy wheels a bicycle across the stage, laughing and carousing with his friends. The bicycle remains onstage through the first act, occasionally pedaled by the boy but mostly left in a corner, untouched and overturned. Along comes Werther, the melancholic protagonist, just in from the fields, walking as if in a daze and singing of his love for nature. He leans in to smell a bouquet of flowers on the kitchen table. He admires the sound of the children, now off-stage, singing Christmas carols in July. Almost absent-mindedly, he approaches the bicycle and spins the back wheel, watching it turn round and round.            One cannot help but wonder what the Opera of Montreal means with this bicycle. Werther, a French opera written in 1887 by Jules Massenet, is based on a 1774 novel by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Bikes were not yet invented in the era of the writer and not yet popular in that of the composer; one wonders, then, about the meaning of this innovation and what it tells us about the timeless Werther story.

In Geothe’s novel, Werther, a prototypically sensitive and passionate young poet, meets and falls helplessly in love with Charlotte, who is engaged to Albert. The wedding throws Werther into a fierce, suicidal depression. When he realizes Charlotte will never leave Albert, he borrows the latter’s pistols and shoots himself in the stomach. Charlotte rushes to the scene and holds Werther while he dies.

The opera based on this story could quite possibly have been based not on the novel at all but rather on a summary of the same brevity as the one above. It covers the rough plot outline but doesn’t even attempt to depict the more interesting aspects of Goethe’s novel. It eschews the epistolary form of the novel (letters from Werther to his friend Wilhelm) for a more direct dramatic approach, and the audience loses the relatively unmediated access that the letters give us to the state of the protagonist’s mind.

Werther as a musical composition, however, provides an additional outlet for expression that gives the story a direct emotional appeal.  Although originally written for a tenor, Massenet reworked the composition in 1902 to accommodate a baritone he wanted to sing the part of Werther. Opera of Montreal chose to produce this rarer version, believing correctly that the baritone (Phillip Addis) would enrich the depth of Werther’s passion and fall.

A review of a 1986 performance of Werther by the New York City Opera, stated, “The only way to approach Werther is to assume that the 20th century never happened. There is almost no way that the psychological, religious, and social dilemmas that faced Goethe’s sorrowful young hero in the 18th century can be translated into modern terms.” Globalization, for instance, among other social and cultural changes, has often been described as destroying our sense of living within horizons: we recognize those horizons as arbitrary and therefore as meaningless. We couldn’t possibly experience or empathize with Werther’s rhapsodic views about Charlotte and the world.

The bicycle, then, as emblematic of the Opera’s decision to situate the story of Werther in the 20th century (called “gratuitous” by the Gazette), can be seen as a response to the suggestion that we moderns are incapable of either appreciating or replicating such commitments. The children ride bicycles, the women wear flapper-like dresses, Charlotte uses a telephone to call for help after Werther’s suicide: all these remind the audience that what Werther suffered through were not merely pre-modern histrionics but rather quintessentially human experiences.

Pessimists though we often are, we too create horizons for ourselves, various sublime boundaries within which we have no choice but to live our everyday lives. Werther, captivated by the spinning wheel of the bicycle, is no different than one of us, stopping at the corner of Pine and Park and admiring the snowy cliffs of Mount Royal. When Werther sings to Charlotte, “These eyes, my horizon, these sweet eyes,” we know what he’s talking about. The poetry stirs us because we intuitively know what it means.

Werther is playing at Salle Wilfrid-Pelletier, Place des Arts Jan. 26, 29, 31, and Feb. 3. For more information, visit operademontreal.com.

Alice Walker

What do you do when you’re trapped in a Buenos Aires prison? You fantasize about movie stars, of course.

That, at least, is how Molina—a gay window-dresser in prison for “corrupting a minor”—has gotten through his darkest hours. When Valentin, a hunky Marxist revolutionary accused of attempting to overthrow the government, becomes Molina’s new cellmate, the self-described “resident queen” is forced to choose between cooperating with the prison’s wardens to obtain his freedom, and risking his own life to save the man he soon grows to love.

This slightly twisted plotline belongs to The Kiss of The Spider Woman, the latest musical production to come from the Arts Undergraduate Theatre Society. Directed by Renée Hodgins, this play is anything but your average musical. The prison is run by cruel vixens, the innocent are the ones incarcerated, and the love story takes place between two men—one of whom is not homosexual.

Initially, Valentin (Ryan Peters) seems more bothered by Molina’s flamboyancy than by his own imprisonment. While he wants to be left alone to read Marx in bed and dream about his beloved Marta, Molina (Dane Stewart) spends his day re-enacting scenes from movies featuring his favourite movie star, Aurora (Zara Jestadt). Unlike Valentin, who exists in the world of cold, harsh facts, Molina escapes dreary prison life by inhabiting a dream world in which the beautiful Aurora sings and dances his troubles away. The one role Aurora plays that Molina is not tempted by, however, is that of the Spider Woman, who murders her victims with one fatal kiss.

Juxtaposed with scenes of lacklustre prison life are outbursts of song and dance, in which multiple “spider women,” played by girls in tight black pants, shake their asses and perform sultry dance numbers. Always spearheading the dance is the Spider Woman, threatening to assault the prisoners’ imaginations with her tantalizing but lethal touch. In this musical, proscribed gender roles are cast into question, as women are both objects of desire—Molina dreams of Aurora, Valentin of Marta—and also the ones responsible for cruel and unusual torture. The three prison wardens are modern Brides of Dracula, who move in gyrating motion, finish each other’s sentences, and play up their feminine wiles to extract information from prisoners, and Valentin chastises Molina for not acting “manly.” Like the black widow spider, who bites the male spider’s head off once she is impregnated, the women of Kiss are as fatal as they are seductive.

Not an easy or straightforward production to stage, the AUTS manages to pull off the musical with an impressive level of professionalism. The atmosphere is decidedly dark, with black bars framing the stage and serving as an artful means through which the prisoners can move their spider-like limbs. As the composers of Kiss, John Kander and Fred Ebb, are also responsible for shows like Cabaret and Chicago, it makes sense that the show depicts a dark, retro style.

Although quite hammy at times, Stewart’s portrayal of Molina is incredibly poignant; in addition to his Broadway-calibre singing, he manages at once to delight audiences with his off-hand jokes and stir emotion when he faces darker struggles like external homophobia and coercion by the wardens. Peters’s Valentin is less sympathetic, but his hauntingly beautiful vocal performance stirs. Finally, Jestadt handles her role as Aurora with poise and skill, capturing the spirit of the attention-mongering Hollywood actress without hogging the stage herself. The impressive size of the orchestral accompaniment also adds an essential dramatic component to support the singers.  

Based on the 1976 novel by Argentine writer Manuel Puig, the play grapples with the price of a disengaged aesthetic perspective; in a world where people are asked to take sides, maintaining that you are simply “co-operating” with an unjust authority is never a neutral stance. While Molina teaches Valentin about the subversive potential of escapism—as well as a few more scandalous lessons—Valentin teaches Molina the value of becoming an engaged citizen. The chorus repeats the haunting phrase “over the wall” to signal a world beyond the prison’s walls, but it is ironically within them that the psyche is able to discover new terrain.   

The Kiss of the Spider Woman runs at Moyse Hall, Jan. 27-29 at 7:30 p.m. $11.