Resplendently they lived, passionately they loved, and yet tragically they must die.
The Canadian Opera Company has not mounted Gounod’s Roméo et Juliette since 1992 and the 2025/26 season’s iteration — borrowed from the Malmö Opera and directed by Amy Lane — is worth the wait. Most notably, it sets aside the expected Veronian staging and envisions its titular star-crossed lovers among the glamour and grit of 19th-century New York.
The French-language libretto by Jules Barber and Michel Carré excises characters such as the lovers’ mothers, includes an additional death, and dispenses of the play’s heightened language in favor of simple, poetic lines — whose romance is heightened by Yves Abel’s passionate conducting of the COC orchestra.
It begins with the Capulets’ masquerade ball that set and costume designer Emma Ryott’s campy imagination transforms into a carnivalesque playground called Theatre Bizarre, featuring gilded chairs, an outsized big mouth game, and the giant bust of a grinning clown.
Through a thicket of vaudevillian attendees, including dancers clad in glittery pancake tutus and untamed gossamer wigs, Roméo (tenor Stephen Costello) falls under the spell of Juliette (soprano Kseniia Proshina, returning to a role she originated in Malmö). She enchants him with “Je veux vivre,” an aria that Proshina — lilting her way to its final sustained note — executes in such a relaxed, graceful manner it warranted the first of many rounds of enthusiastic applause on opening night.
With the assistance of Mercutio (bass-baritone Gordon Binter) and Tybalt (tenor Owen McCausland), the pair soon realize they belong to opposing sides of a family rivalry, but they quickly resolve that the force of their love may possess the power to extinguish the divide.
Lane’s modernizing impulse and Ryott’s stylistic range represent the bifurcation between the houses’ heads: after the couple decides to get married — in the second of four key duets spread throughout — the set transforms into backroads of industry, complete with closed shutters and bare steel frames. Ryott trades in a sumptuous palette for gradations of brown and grey, starkly marking the descent from the opulence of the Capulets to the harsh-edged complexes where the Montagues, whom the director’s note frames as immigrants, reside.
Whether it be in the depiction of the gang brawls, which is inspired by Martin Scorsese’s Gangs of New York (as the program reveals), or in the treacly courtship that evokes the imagery of Jerome Robbins and Robert Wise’s West Side Story, Lane applies her cinematic references, in addition to theatrical traditions, such as burlesque, onto the opera’s scaffolding. This decision to suffuse the well-worn material with a variety of textures and tones breathes new life into it, but the elements never cohere, or complement each other, and are difficult to latch onto — similar though, I suppose, to the ever-changing contours of the erratic world entrapping the lovers.
That cinematic impulse is apparent in Charlie Morgan Jones’ lighting design as well, which subtly draws our attention towards a handful of moments by intensifying the brightness of a ray of light. When the pair first lay eyes on each other; when they consummate their love on their honeymoon; or when Juliette, in a wedding dress, finds herself surrounded by black-clad dancers, the ray glows, often accompanied by a musical cue, forming a series of close-ups into the characters’ emotional lives, manifesting the sparks occurring beneath the surface.
The opera — which runs at 195 minutes, over five acts and one intermission — is so grand, and Gounod’s music so august, that, at the start of Act Four, I was surprised to find an image as simple as the pair peacefully spooning in bed struck a sympathetic chord with me. Their fearless attitude toward death made me feel protective of them — those helpless dreamers.
Through the chemistry of Proshina, who stuns with her vocal athleticism in “Amour anime mon courage,” and Costello, whose warbled exaltations communicate Roméo’s feelings of injustice, I was convinced of the bond that, in aria after aria, inches its way to the inevitable conclusion, which doesn’t play itself as a straight tragedy. Instead, what Gounod and Lane grant their stubborn lovers is a concluding exchange: yet another tentative union of their pristine voices that eventually interlace, punctuated with a final kiss — an earnest note of amorousness.
“How sweet is this moment,” Juliette sings to Roméo as she bleeds to death.
Beyond the campy ball, the iconic balcony, the sword play, and the dubious potions, the COC’s Roméo et Juliette never loses sight of what makes this story endure: that moving capacity to see the beauty in the bloodshed, and to feel hope, even in the bizarrest of times.
Roméo et Juliette runs at the Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts until October 18. Tickets are available here.
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WRITTEN BY
Nirris Nagendrarajah
Nirris Nagendrarajah (he/him) is a freelance culture critic from Toronto whose work has appeared in LudwigVan, OperaWire, MetRadio, Polyester, Fête Chinoise, In The Mood Magazine, and Cha: An Asian Literary Journal. He was an Assistant Dramaturge for ‘Unmute,’ which premiered at 2024’s Toronto Fringe Festival, and is currently at work on a novel about the anxiety of waiting.
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