A scene from Pacific Opera Victoria's "Mary's Wedding"
Mary's Wedding
- Pacific Opera Victoria
- At MacPherson Playhouse in Victoria on Wednesday
There is so little new opera in Canada that one hesitates to proffer anything more damning than faint-hearted congratulations when a new work finally makes it to a major stage, lest it jeopardize the programming of anything new in the future. Congratulations are faint indeed when it comes to Mary's Wedding.
It took Pacific Opera Victoria three years to get Mary's Wedding – which received its premiere on Nov. 10 in Victoria – to production, which means that a lot of time and money was already invested before the finished work proved itself less than scintillating. But POV's music director Timothy Vernon surely could have anticipated what kind of music Andrew P. MacDonald would write. He has composed a lot of music, and even if this is his first opera, MacDonald was not an unknown quantity. Nor was the libretto, adapted by Stephen Massicotte from his successful play of the same name. In other words, POV got what it ordered: a play-it-safe, "heartwarming," solidly Canadian story set during the Great War and music that sounds like it might have been composed some time between that war and the next.
So the real question is why did POV order this? Why weren't they more courageous? Why didn't they approach a composer (and a librettist) with a less anachronistic, more experimental style? Three years down the line, it's too late to remake the opera. Do we remake the definition of "new Canadian opera" instead?
Mary's Wedding is a love story that takes place in flashbacks, letters and dream sequences – at home on the farm, at the front in the trenches. Its two main characters, Mary and her first love, Charlie, who was killed in the war, are almost always on stage. Indeed Betty Waynne Allison, as Mary, has a tremendous amount to sing and a tremendous amount of text to deliver. Fortunately she graces MacDonald's angular but wide-ranging lyrical melodies with personable warmth and ringing tone. And although Thomas Macleay's tenor voice isn't big and he sure can't act, the geniality of his singing and his bumpkin-sweet characterization of Charlie reminds us that many of these soldiers were just kids.
But how dangerous the epistolary structure, so fundamentally undramatic. And what a banal and wordy libretto, every phrase repeated multiple times. Hammer-stroke soldiers' choruses of "Heave-ho!" and "What a lot of work to be done!" Townsfolk singing, "I just love a tea on Saturday!" The numbingly un-poetic refrain: "According to plan." A full chorus pealing "Dear Mary, Dear Mary" as Mary sings the text of Charlie's letter.
And was director Michael Shamata sleeping through the inadvertent moments of comedy that should have been culled long ago? A soldier sings, "A lot of bags to be carried …" and the very next moment the stagehands carry Mary (in her bed) off stage. Several scenes take place "on horseback," which means the characters – sometimes a whole line of soldiers – stand like kindergarteners playing horse without an ounce of verisimilitude, one arm forward with the reins, legs astraddle, bouncing. And the mortally wounded Sergeant Flowerdew (bass Alain Coulombe), reminding Charlie of what's most important in life, is allowed to get a laugh in his last breath as he remembers "Bacon!" No pathos with his demise.
Nor with Charlie's either, for the second he's shot the chorus jumps in with "His blood! His blood!" No silence for the death to register (nor is there any silence in MacDonald's unrelenting score). There are touching moments, to be sure, but most result from an accumulation of images provided verbally. MacDonald's square, turgid music, so diligently realized by POV's orchestra, rarely takes us beyond the text.
Imagine an allegorical play about new music in Canada. The character "Opera" is about to walk onstage. What do we really want that character to look like?
The final two performances of Mary's Wedding's are Friday at 8 p.m. and Sunday at 2:30 p.m.