N
o matter the venue, style or genre, art is a
conversation between creator, performer and
audience. Each encounters the work with her
own perceptions and interprets it in her own
way. That’s empowering, but it can also be
isolating, especially given today’s increasingly fractured cultural
landscape. Toronto’s biggest arts and culture organizations,
however, still provide us with the opportunity to see plays,
concerts and exhibitions that are as inclusive as they are challenging,
proving that mass appeal doesn’t have to be mundane.
ON STAGE FOR ALL
The Bodyguard photo by paul Coltas.
Widely accessible stories with universal themes have long
comprised live theatre’s canon, from Shakespeare’s works to the
biggest Broadway spectacles. Even so, Toronto’s 2016-17 stage
season seems the stuff of legend—literally, with a number of
shows that give life to our shared archetypes, and in one case,
elevate a single man’s story to the level of myth.
Opera is arguably the modern art form most indebted to
mythology—both the “classical” tales of gods and heroes, as
well as historical accounts that have, over time, gained many
of the qualities of folklore. For centuries, operatic libretti have
borrowed from or explicitly retold the fables and sagas of yore.
No surprise, then, that such stories fill the Canadian Opera
Company’s current slate. A new COC production of the bel canto
work Norma (October 6 to November 5, 2016), for instance,
has Canadian soprano Sondra Radvanovsky and South African
soprano Elza van den Heever sharing the role of a druid
priestess betrayed by her Roman lover, and Handel’s Ariodante
(October 16 to November 4, 2016) adapts a portion of a
16th-century epic poem (Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando Furiosa)
as a meditation on sexual jealousy. But the real-life-turnedquasi-folk story of a Métis leader’s martyrdom is undoubtedly
the COC’s most anticipated new offering: Louis Riel (April 20
to May 13, 2017), which dramatizes a seminal chapter in
Canada’s nascent nationhood and makes a conflicted hero of
its rebellious lead.
Making new myths is the stock-in-trade of modern musicals.
Toronto’s Mirvish Productions has some intriguing ones (plus
non-singing, non-dancing theatrical offerings) on its calendar.
The Bodyguard (February 11 to May 14, 2017) stages the
damsel-in-distress romance of the 1992 Whitney Houston
film, while Come From Away (November 15, 2016 to January
8, 2017), playing here before heading to Broadway, highlights
B E v E R Ly K N i g H T i N t h e B O dy g uA R d
essential toronto 2016-2017
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