I was introduced to Giacomo Puccini’s Madama Butterfly at six years old. Well, sort of. My parents were watching some rendition was on television, but I wasn’t allowed to watch, which confused me because with a title like Madama Butterfly, it sounds like it’s made for little girls. I remember sitting in the next room […]

This week, Vancouver Opera presents the last three performances of Die Fledermaus (The Bat), the Austrian operetta composed by Johann Strauss Jr., adapted by UBC’s Nancy Hermiston to include theatrical dialogue in English with timely or local references. Eisenstein (Roger Honeywell) is dismayed to find that a disguised Rosalinde (Joyce El-Khoury) has his watch. Photo […]

“It was intense,” my niece told me this morning when I asked her about the show last night. I took her to see Stickboy at Vancouver Opera, which was composed by Neil Weisensel and written by Shane Koyczan. Given my general knowledge of the libretto — based on Koyczan’s powerful book about a boy who, […]

Vancouver Opera presents the world’s sexiest opera, Carmen, which became the fastest-selling production in Vancouver Opera history when it last took to the Queen Elizabeth Theatre stage five years ago. This gorgeous production of Carmen, directed by Joel Ivany Joel Ivany Joel Ivany, is set in 1930s-1940s Latin America, complete with the heat, grit and […]

Soon after I completed my online order of “Flint and Feather” the biography of E. Pauline Johnson by Charlotte Gray, I called Composer Tobin Stokes who mentioned that he had a copy of the book sitting by him as we chatted. Stokes was tasked with composing Margaret Atwood‘s libretto for PAULINE, a chamber opera about […]