Onstage at the Four Seasons Centre 145 Queen St. W., Toronto.
Performance time: APPROX. 2 HRS including one intermission.
Sung in Hungarian and German with English SURTITLES™.
MYSTERY. MURDER. MADNESS.
A bride unlocks the rooms of her mysterious husband’s castle. A woman, lost in the woods, descends into madness. Robert Lepage’s ground-breaking production established the COC universally as a visionary and compelling company.
CAST AND CREATIVE TEAMS
| Bluebeard’s Castle: | ||
| Bluebeard | John Relyea | |
| Judith | Ekaterina Gubanova | |
| Erwartung: | ||
| Woman | Krisztina Szabó | |
| Conductor: | Johannes Debus | |
| Director: | Robert Lepage | |
| Set and Costume Designer: | Michael Levine | |
| Lighting Designer: | Robert Thomson | |
| Media Effects Designer | Laurie-Shawn Borzovoy |
REVIEWS OF 1995 PRODUCTION
Theatre director Robert Lepage has teamed up with production designer Michael Levine, lighting designer Robert Thomson and “media effects designer” Laurie-Shawn Borzovoy to stun audiences with a sensory immersion that brings Schoenberg out of the dissonant wings into the dazzling light of night. As opera intends, Erwartung/Bluebeard focuses all the artifice of the modern stage on its purpose. (It is wonderful that the COC lets such creative people have their heads.)
William Thorsell, The Globe and Mail, January 21, 1995
The Canadian Opera Company’s award-winning, world-travelling, historic double bill of Bartok and Schoenberg made a triumphant return to Toronto… in every way richer, deeper, more gripping and masterful than ever before.
Urjo Kareda, The Globe and Mail, January 13, 1995
Two years and successful visits to New York, Edinburgh and Melbourne later, the most widely celebrated production in the history of the Canadian Opera Company came back home last night to the [Sony Centre], looking and sounding better than ever.
William Littler, The Toronto Star, January 12, 1995
Greatness, perfection, genius…these are not words an arts columnist should use too often for fear of debasing the coinage. But having had a week to cool down, I still have no hesitation in using them to describe the Canadian Opera Company’s double bill…
Bronwyn Drainie, The Globe and Mail, January 19, 1995
In an ideal world, the COC would have its own house, so that this production could be kept in the active repertoire and revived again and again. But even in our flawed reality, this must not be the last time this marvel is seen here. There is nothing like it anywhere else.
Urjo Kareda, The Globe and Mail, January 13, 1995
…a once in a lifetime experience.
Richard Ouzounian, CBC Radio, January 1995
This was one of those rare evenings in which opera fully realizes its potential as an art form.
Peter Dyson, Opera magazine, June 1995
The staging pummels the senses and creates an upside down world of mad surrealism. The special effects, limbs emerging from walls, bodies defying gravity, are worthy of a film studio.
Dick Smyth, 680 News, January 1995
…space and perspective are twisted and distorted until the entire audience is looking at this dank and tiny world through eyes of madness.
John Coulbourn, The Toronto Sun, January 13, 1995
Again, Lepage toys with perspective, showing us the “inside” of a room one minute, the “outside” the next. Or he makes the vertical seem horizontal, by placing an actor in a chair bolted to the wall. Again, he shows us why his mastery of stage techniques is coveted the world over, and why his understated elegance with regard to human gesture has made him a favourite of great actors.
Christopher Winsor, Eye magazine, January 19, 1995
Lepage’s control of stage abracadabra is always linked to emotional and psychological investigation, and wonderfully attuned to Richard Bradshaw’s slithery reading of this supreme score.
Urjo Kareda, The Globe and Mail, January 13, 1995
Lepage and Levine do not actually show us the horrors behind most of those doors; they invite us to experience them through Judith’s eyes, fuelling our imaginations with Bartok’s potently atmospheric music.
William Littler, The Toronto Star, January 12, 1995
An eye-opening brush with operatic genius.
Bronwyn Drainie, The Globe and Mail, January 19, 1995
It ain’t Puccini. But it is rather wonderful and an example of the leading edge work an opera company worthy of the name must do.
Dick Smyth, 680 News, January 1995
The world beyond, underneath, inside. Isn’t it possible that our definition of greatness in art springs from our intuition that the artist has carried us into hidden and forbidden lands? I’m sure that what I was responding to last week at Bluebeard’s Castle and Erwartung… I’m sure that it is something immeasurably precious that human beings cannot live without.
Bronwyn Drainie, The Globe and Mail, January 19, 1995
Robert Lepage’s direction can’t help but win opera a new audience and revivify the stodgiest opera queen’s love of the form.
Bert Archer, Xtra!, January 20, 1995
But nobody has made them as subtle and mesmerizing an evocation of early 20th-century anxieties, the struggle between a desire for light and an instinct for darkness, as Robert Lepage and his collaborators in this production.
Urjo Kareda, The Globe and Mail, January 13, 1995
This is opera brought up to speed, opera for our time.
Bert Archer, Xtra!, January 20, 1995
Freud looms like a dark guardian angel over both works, and for me – never an opera buff – the psychoanalytic quest seems the perfect subject matter for this art form. Opera made sense to me for the first time last week.
Bronwyn Drainie, The Globe and Mail, January 19, 1995
These two pieces are visually powerful, presenting images you have seen till now only in nightmares and on drug trips.
Dick Smyth, 680 News, January 1995
Both operas are stunning in every way, but what is most impressive to me is how they have been designed to allow for the full imaginative participation by the audience. Opera is seen, alternately, as elitist art or as something laughable, but what is going on here is what goes on in any successful artistic endeavour. A world is created – an in this case it is a very dark world with very primal emotions – and because this world is complex enough to engage everyone, an audience goes on a journey, unlocking its own doors, enriching itself in the process.
Carole Corbeil, The Toronto Star, January 21, 1995
People living within commuting distance of Front Street who don’t take the opportunity to see one of the performances are missing one of the most exciting artistic creations of this century anywhere in the world.
Bronwyn Drainie, The Globe and Mail, January 19, 1995
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