(Photo credit: Ryan Harper)

Opera Revue is a company made of three talented individuals: soprano Danie Friesen, baritone Alexander Hajek, and the sonic backbone of it all, pianist Elise Harris.

Their mission, they say, is to introduce opera to newcomers and deliver a fresh way to experience it for veterans in a relaxed environment at an affordable price.

My attitude towards opera has primarily been informed by Wayne Koestenbaum who, in his book “The Queen’s Throat,” wrote: “Opera has the power to warn you that you have wasted your life. You haven’t acted on your desires. You’ve suffered a stunted, vicarious existence. You’ve silenced your passions…and your throat is closed.”

Which is to say on a recent, rainy November night, at the Redwood Theatre in Leslieville, the question on everyone’s mind was: could Opera Revue open our throats?

Illuminating Production

The show—circus-themed—began with a joke of sorts. Hajek, who also served as the main tone-setting emcee, explained that the city had not granted them the permits to use a tiger and a lion, but that they always have a back-up plan: which was for him and Friesen to put on ears and tails and get up onto stools, where they performed Rossini’s “Cat Duet,” jumping through hoops and coughing up hair balls, until their voices collided to create a harmonious meow.

The laughs from the audience were elicited from the sheer ridiculousness of how seriously they were taking themselves. Those who couldn’t get in on the joke, chuckled in unease.

Throughout the show there were gags, ranging from a missing Burmese python to pulling out a bazooka from a pant pocket, or imitating a juggler on a motorcycle to Freisen throwing a pie in Hajek’s face to punctuate Harris’ ending note. But this sense of disorientation is part of the genius of Opera Revue’s project: to upend one’s expectations by throwing you off your little pedestal so that they can put you onto something else. This is their vaudevillian way of things.

When the introductory remarks were over, and the house lights went down, Hajek turned on a small lamp light above his head to sing an aria “Si Può,” from Leoncavallo’s “Pagliacci,” which, in the classical nature of his voice and sheer emotive power, allowed listeners to ascend with it. Just as he was about to end, Hajek rose his hand so that he could turn off the light along with the last note, which, even in it’s scaled-down form, produced the intense, dramatic moment we were longing for.

Later on in the show, during a medley to celebrate the Puccini’s centenary, Hajek was joined by one of the night’s three guests: the aerial silk artist Haley Shannon, who, in black-and-white striped pants, shimmied her way up two white silks that she spun in and hung from. Part of the wonder of watching her get herself into a knot and perform a series of moves so that she could secure her feet without the use of her hands, is the grace with which she performed it, the seeming calm and ease, as though, for her, to become one with the rope is as natural as it is for us to breathe. The art of aerial silk lies in the fact that it is about using the constraints of life to create a momentary balance that happens to be beautiful, trusting the whole of your body to suspend disbelief with pure belief. At one point Shannon had managed to maneuver herself into a harness so that the silks were on other sides of her, so that when she flapped them we suddenly found ourselves having witnessed a human become a bird—no: an angel.

Towards the end of their performance, Hajek joined in singing “Alidoro’s Aria” from “La Cenerentola,” which at the moment that it crescendoed, Shannon juxtaposed it by dropping down from the top of the crane spinning, so that—for a brief, shining moment—we believed that she might crash into the ground. After all, what is a show without a few risks?

The audience gasped then applauded.

“Wow,” the man sitting behind me said. “That’s all I have to say.”

More Production & Cast Highlights

Another guest of the night, Kalen Davidson, a circus artist who is fresh off performing with Cirque Du Soleil, performed two sets: both of which were about balance and risk, which he did, he repeatedly said, for our entertainment. In the first, in which he feigned nervousness, he juggled pinballs that glowed red and, with the help of an audience member, Shannon, whose hair, it was noted, smelled of cinnamon, spun plates on machetes while balancing on a big red ball.

In the second set he played with fire, creating two whirling balls of fire that became one circle of hell, and then taking a large metal square with various flames and balancing it in his mouth. It was here, as the audience applauded and couldn’t keep their eyes off him, that Davidson’s face, glowing with the light of the fire, beamed with the pleasure of knowing its holding an audience rapt.

But the standout was the two appearances from the Canadian soprano Ambur Braid, who audiences may know from her titular role in the Canadian Opera Company’s production of “Salome.” In the first, singing “Barak, main Mann,” from Strauss’s “Die Frau Ohne Schatten,” she appeared on the high stage barefoot, wearing a silver sequin dress that reminded one of the undulating surface of the lake when summer sun shines directly onto it, and immediately entered into character, an empress of two minds who lives in fear of what will become of her.

Here was the diva I was waiting to encounter, who causes one to reconsider the power of a voice, filling a room. “The volume, height, depth, lushness, and excess of operatic utterance reveal, by contrast, how small your gestures have been until now,” writes Koestenbaum: “How impoverished your physicality; you have only used a fraction of your bodily endowment.”

As Braid crossed and then uncrossed her legs, her voice silenced every train of thought, her voice demanded you pay attention to it, to your puniness. As Hajek said early on, Opera Revue liked to break the rules, meaning that for her second performance Braid had changed into a red pantsuit with a white ruffle collar—to fit in with the clown theme—where she performed “Il Va Venir” from Halévy’s “La Juive.” But before she began, she said that she was told a black panther—the “il” in “il va venir”—would be joining her on stage and—in a call back to the lion, the tiger and the permits—there was no expectation that the panther would appear, so when she signalled that it was time for his entrance—and we expected Hajek or nothing at all—it was the black dog named Walter appearing and jumping through a hola hoop for the treat that Braid kept in her pocket and howling as her voice trembled.
What is an opera performance if not a series of tricks—where the sound and the sight, which, for some time, run parallel to each other, suddenly, briefly collide to create a moment—that are given to the audience along the way to keep them engaged, an audience of opera hounds.

Surprising Elements

The surprise of the show, though, was Danie Friesen, whose sections, at first, I didn’t quite understand. In her first solo, she dressed herself as a clown-meets-fraulien, who sings “I Want Magic” from “A Streetcar Named Desire,” singing “Real? Who wants real? I want magic. That’s what I want. That’s what I try to give to people.” She drew red circles on each of her cheeks with nail polish; donned a cone-shaped hat with a white pom-pom atop it and a ruffly skirt and a corset. When she reappeared towards the end of the show, singing “Vesti La Giubba” from “Pagliacci,” her tune changed and she threw away the hat, taking off the armour with which she’s equipped herself with, undoing the very thing that she’d created over the course of the show—this happy clown turned sad—after which an emptiness follows liberation.

The fool is the one that feels the deepest and Freisen’s modesty belies her operatic ambitions.

In the last number, each member of Opera Revue donned a black clown nose, performing a rendition of Sondheim’s “Send in the Clowns” and near the end, Freisen enchantingly turned the microphone towards Harris so that she could deliver the volta of the standard.

“Don’t bother,” she said of the clowns: “They’re here.”

“I digress,” Hajek chided early on in the night; and throughout the night that is what Opera Revue did, each digression allowed them to exhibit another aspect of their personality, one which, historically, doesn’t have place in the opera halls, which, gradually, told its own story.

It was quite a throat-opening ruckus indeed.