The title says Opera, but the work is more of a musical. Not that this has stopped a group of young Toronto operatic upstarts from embracing the socially subversive power of Bertold Brecht and Kurt Weill’s 1928 hit, Threepenny Opera.
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Essential Opera presents its one-night-only production at Heliconian Hall on Wednesday.
Only having one performance didn’t stop Essential Opera’s Maureen Batt and Erin Bardua from thinking big, including coming up with their own translation for the German dialogue and then adapting it to the company’s “essential” mandate.
“There was no way to use what already existed and do what we want with it,” says Bardua of the multiple English translations (including one overseen by Leonard Bernstein in the early 1950s) published over the past 84 years.
Bardua, who sings the role of Lucy, estimates that Essential Opera’s semi-staged version will come in at about half the length of a regular production. “We’ve kept all the plot points and a lot of the jokes,” she says, while cutting a lot of plot exposition, and what she calls “holding forth.”
“After all, we’re doing a concert, so it should be the music that’s prevalent. But we preserved enough of the talking to convey the feel of the show,” she adds. The songs themselves are sung in the original German.
The singer says she has no regrets over the months spent in translating and adapting the work with Batt (who stars as Polly): “It was a big, big job, but I’m really glad we did it. We had to dive so deep into that text and its origins that it helped us figure out what we wanted to do – and why. We both feel like we couldn’t possibly know this work more intimately at this point.”
Bardua realises that this isn’t opera, but she has a soft spot for Weill’s best-known score, which includes “Mack the Knife,” a song that keeps getting recorded and adapted by jazz as well as pop singers.
“This was the music that I first fell in love with when I started singing more seriously,” she declares. “It makes sense for us to be doing this. It’s another show where we can both have a role and have a lot of other up and coming singers. It makes sense to make a reduced version, because that’s almost the point of the show. It just felt like a great fit for us.”
And even though it’s a musical, it’s no cakewalk.
“As we started working on it, we began to see that this is a huge undertaking. We thought it would be easy compared to a fully scored actual opera, but it’s not,” Bardua admits. “I started to see why people don’t just throw up a Threepenny Opera off the cuff every year.”
Rather than an orchestra, music director Cathy Nosaty accompanies from the venue’s excellent grand piano, as well as an accordion. “She whipped out her accordion at the first music rehearsal and the cast just about lost their minds, so we decided, yeah, that has to happen,” Bardua recalls.
The large cast includes many names that should be familiar to people who follow Toronto’s voice community, including the excellent Jeremy Ludwig as Macheath, David Roth as Peachum and Laura McAlpine as Jenny. The dress code for the cast is contemporary cabaret, which should mean a lot of black.
Of course the cast would love to do more than one performance but, as it marks its third season, Essential Opera is still personally funded by Bardua and Batt.
“It comes down to how many nights are we able to rent a venue out of our own bank accounts hoping that enough people will come so we can make that back and can still compensate the artists for their hard work,” says the singer. She adds that this is safer than ending up in debt and not being able to contemplate anything new in the future.
For all the details on the show, click here.
And here is a promotional trailer:
John Terauds
- Classical Music 101: What Does A Conductor Do? - June 17, 2019
- Classical Music 101 | What Does Period Instrument Mean? - May 6, 2019
- CLASSICAL MUSIC 101 | What Does It Mean To Be In Tune? - April 23, 2019
