Having been around some 400 years opera is a survivor. Still opera companies are always seeking new ways of presenting their work and connecting with their audience — and you might remember Calgary Opera doing just that with a pack of melodious buccaneers in last summer’s outdoor production of Gilbert and Sullivan’s Pirates of Penzance.
Pirates marked the inaugural year of the Opera in the Village festival — followed by this year’s centrepiece Candide — but the idea has been cooking for some time. Five years ago Calgary Opera began exploring ways of expanding its winter season and looked to its outreach programs as a model — that is the activities that took them out of the Jubilee concert hall and directly into communities. “[We] saw that there was greater room for attracting people and opportunity to bring people to our world by looking at alternative venues alternative locations moving out of the downtown region for some of our presentations” says Bob McPhee Calgary Opera’s general director and CEO. “We began to focus more on how we could broaden our outreach: rather than bringing people to us us going to them more.”
With that in mind they began to investigate approaches venues and times of year. “In terms of the winter season people’s lives are saturated between… a major theatre season a major orchestra season ballet and our regular opera season — there’s a lot in the market” says McPhee explaining why they chose summer. Calgary Opera also struck up a partnership with the Calgary Municipal Land Corporation and the East Village. “A lot of the developers were keen on trying to bring people down to the East Village” says McPhee. “We also felt that the environment of a large outdoor tent and a summertime event was attractive not only to our existing audience but also to an audience that maybe had never attended opera before.”
Thus was born Opera in the Village Canada’s only outdoor summer opera festival.
Summer opera festivals aren’t quite so rare in other countries. “You go to Europe and virtually every city that has an opera company has a summer outdoor event and sadly in Canada they’re lacking there isn’t anything of this nature” says McPhee who also cites Santa Fe and Glimmerglass in New York state as major American examples. “We felt it was also a niche that was missing nationally and locally.”
“There’s no such thing as having a proscenium anymore there’s no such thing as stage right or stage left or upstage or downstage so it’s been really neat to abandon those theatre terms and look at the stage in a totally different way.”
Canada’s unreliable climate and all-too-brief summers may be one reason why no outdoor opera festivals have taken root in our country or it may be the outlay of costs: putting up a tent and enough infrastructure to stage an opera increases costs dramatically. There have been a few attempts at this sort of thing in Canada such as Ottawa’s summer performances in the National Arts Centre but nothing so far has stuck. Part of the winning solution McPhee believes is that in summertime people simply want to be outside. “It’s festival season in every city across this country and festivals are viewed as outdoor events and that I think was key to making ours work in the first year and hopefully for many years to come” he says.
Calgary Opera took its time laying a strong foundation for the inaugural 2013 festival. “I’ll give my staff incredible credit and the East Village with their support in the planning” says McPhee. “It took us four years to get it off the ground but I think that time was well spent on research and studies and discussion of different ways to handle it.”
All that R&D paid off: McPhee describes the first year of the fest in 2013 as a “phenomenal success.”
“There weren’t any disasters we had perfect weather last year we had perfect attendance and we had a show that was incredibly well received by the audience and we made budget on the first year out” he says. “When you have all of those ducks lined up it’s an opportunity to build on it rather than make adjustments from the first year.”
People came out in droves in 2013 with an attendance rate of 97 per cent — one of the reasons for expanding this year’s festival to two weekends from one — and almost two-thirds of those attendees were previously unknown to Calgary Opera. McPhee says that while some first-timers from Opera in the Village have bought tickets to the regular season the transfer hasn’t been huge and in any case that isn’t really the point of the festival. “We’ve already broadened our audience by having a substantially new group of people experience opera in the community and that’s the important thing about this festival” he says — not that he would mind if the 8000 potential Candide attendees turned into Calgary Opera subscribers.
Besides the appeal of a lush winter production in the Jubilee is certainly different from the clowns and karaoke you’ll find at Opera in the Village. “Any festival has to have more than just its main event” says McPhee. “It’s all the packaging: it’s the food trucks it’s everything you can bring to make it a festival event beyond your core mainstage.” And you certainly get it; in fact you could probably miss Candide altogether (not that you’d want to) and still have a good time. New this year are family-friendly hour-long matinee performances of Hansel and Gretel free “So You Think You Can Sing Musical Theatre” competitions for amateur songbirds roving circus performers and kids’ circus workshops plus karaoke at the beer/cider patio and the return of outdoor movies (this year’s lineup includes The Rocky Horror Picture Show Moulin Rouge and Beetlejuice).
Candide of course is the lynchpin of the whole festival. Adapted from Voltaire’s original novella and with music by Leonard Bernstein the English operetta follows the wild peregrinations of a guileless young man Candide and his love Cunegonde. “I really love how vulnerable the character of Candide is” says Matthew Bruce who plays the title role. “He’s been so protected and sheltered and brought up learning about optimism and how it’s the best of all possible worlds the best of all possible situations everything works out for the best — and his journey really is a roller-coaster of ups and downs and he really struggles with this concept of optimism that his master has taught him.”
Bruce is familiar with this opera as he’s just come from Opera Nuova’s production of Candide in Edmonton. He had the same role but not quite an identical part as there are several different versions of Candide kicking around the opera world. “It’s been really neat to go back to the drawing board and this time create a character that’s maybe a little bit different than what I was used to before” he says.
There are other challenges in performing at Opera in the Village one of which is that the stage is set up in the middle of the tent with audience seating on both sides. “It’s been a bit of a learning curve but it’s a really neat concept” says Bruce crediting stage director Rob Herriot who also directed last year’s Pirates of Penzance with helping performers navigate the unfamiliar setup. “There’s no such thing as having a proscenium anymore there’s no such thing as stage right or stage left or upstage or downstage so it’s been really neat to abandon those theatre terms and look at the stage in a totally different way.”
But as usual all of those challenges will likely be invisible to the audience who will just be there to enjoy a good show. “Don’t be frightened by opera: it’s in English it’s hilarious” says McPhee of Candide. “Enjoy an incredible atmospheric evening that is based around opera and a wonderful evening of entertainment.”
A final tip? One of the major lessons from the first year of Opera in the Village: Get your tickets now because it sells out.
