Vancouver Opera starts its 65th season with a precursor to today’s musical comedies

The opening night of Die Fledermaus, the most-performed operetta in the world and this season’s first production in Vancouver, marked the beginning of the 65th season of Vancouver Opera.

During those sixty-five seasons, the company has ambitiously striven to provide a wide array of productions, ranging from the highly demanding by composers such as Wagner and Verdi to the rather more accessible, such as Gilbert and Sullivan, and now its season opener, which translates to The Bat, composed by Johann Strauss II.

Vancouver’s opera leadership is always striving to make opera more popular and so is using this opening production to push the envelope with a re-thinking of the original.

This production of Die Fledermaus’ great central party scene was presented as a costume ball in which the guests were asked to come as movie characters. Did one ever think an opera production would include people convincingly dressed as Marilyn Monroe or Mrs. Robinson and, even more convincingly, sing beautifully while so costumed?

So much for the usual caricature of a large woman with a horned helmet brandishing a sword.

Making this production of the beloved operetta even more accessible, the dialogue was in English and the German songs all had surtitles.

This is not to say that for me the evening was an unadulterated success. I have always found the opening act tediously long, while the lengthy party scene has such a multitude of tuneful and pleasant melodies as to give the impression the composer just stumbled across a drawerful of delightful, unused songs and decided to put them all together in one operetta.

The end result, though, was a work which has become a popular staple of the opera repertoire. Like so many operettas, Die Fledermaus is a precursor to the modern musical comedy.

This Vancouver Opera production proved this with lively comedy, often resulting in roars of laughter from the sold-out audience, including a hilarious prison scene, dominated by a fearsome lady warden. Add to that a multitude of familiar and tuneful melodies and the result was the operatic equivalent of a homerun.

Vancouver Opera is clearly fulfilling its mandate to provide entertainment for everyone and demonstrating that opera is not some esoteric art form suitable only for the musically advanced and the socially pretentious.

As further proof of this, the company’s other productions this season include two widely-different works.

The first of these is a modern opera based on the story of a man trapped in an airport. Think of Tom Hanks in The Terminal. That will almost certainly be a novel experience that will intrigue and delight many people who do not usually attend the opera.

Die Fledermaus will be performed again on Oct. 31, Nov. 2, and Nov. 3.

Rounding out the season, Vancouver Opera will offer up a production of the classic Madama Butterfly – a much beloved, frequently performed work, which will appeal to the traditionalists and certainly be performed to a sold-out crowd.

Here’s to the next 65 years of Vancouver Opera!

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