REVIEW: COC’s elegantly bleak Rigoletto is no laughing matter, Theater News

For much of the Canadian Opera Company’s revival of director Christopher Alden’s take on Verdi’s Rigoletto (which premiered in 2000 and was last performed in Toronto in 2018), a Victorian gentleman’s armchair remains on stage. 

Throughout its three acts — all of which take place in set and costume designer Michael Levine’s stately, smoke-filled, meticulously sculpted gaming room — various characters seat themselves on that chair, including the titular hunchbacked jester (baritone Quinn Kelsey) and his love-struck virgin of a daughter Gilda (soprano Sarah Dufresne). In the prelude, as Rigoletto places a cone-shaped hat on his head, the opera positions itself as an ever-changing answer to who the fool really is. 

Franceso Maria Piave’s Italian-language libretto, adapted from a play by Victor Hugo (and here presented with English surtitles), is set in motion when Count Monterone (baritone Gregory Dahl), avenging the defilement of his daughter (Emily Rocha), issues a curse on Rigoletto and his promiscuous boss the Duke of Mantua (tenor Ben Bliss). Mantua — who Bliss portrays with the perfect balance of cocky flamboyance and carnal verve — appears unaffected despite being the perpetrator, staring up at the high ceilings with fatigue. At the same time Rigoletto holds his head in melodramatic shock, more seriously registering the implications of the curse. 

What complicates matters is when the fickle men of the court are inspired to seek revenge for Rigoletto’s history of mocking them. They scheme to kidnap the young woman they believe to be his mistress, who — in one of many twists of misidentification — is actually Gilda, whose existence has remained a secret from all and whose purity Rigoletto is insistent on preserving. 

“It is a nightmare about an all-powerful and irresponsible ruler,” Alden writes in the director’s notes, pointing to the contemporary resonance of the 1851 opera’s themes. 

Rigoletto suffers from his relation to and abuses of power, as well as his inability to reconcile his double life. “Here at home,” he sings, “I can be a different man.” At home — where Levine trades the luxurious rugs, parlour palms, and grandfather clocks of the gaming room for a dining table and portrait of Rigoletto’s late wife — restlessly lies Gilda, obeying her father’s demands while nursing the love that Mantua, impersonating a poor student, has ignited. 

At the performance I attended, Dufresne took some time to warm up, at times singing so quietly as to be drowned out by Johannes Debus’ elegant command of the COC’s orchestra. Even though she found her stride in the second half, I was disappointed, at the end of Act One, after she confesses her love to Mantua, by her pitchy performance of the technically complex aria “Caro Nome.” By rushing into the high notes, she was unable to sustain them for long, and her coloratura became choppy where it needed to glide and erase the transitional seams. 

At the aria’s climax, when the orchestra jarringly sped up to work around her limitations, I realized the production was also aware of her wrestling with the role’s demands. Rather than discover an inner resolve within the acrobatics of this aria — as great sopranos such as Maria Callas, Anna Moffo, and Sumi Jo have managed to achieve — Dufresne leans into the innocence factor, rendering the altruistic impulse Gilda later follows (in order to save Manuta’s life) as illogical rather than noble. 

Elsewhere, as the vile Sparafucile, bass Peixin Chen brings out the darker colours of Verdi’s score. Simona Genga, as Giovanna, is a memorable supporting presence in her thoughtfully crafted asides, ratcheting up the flair of drama and flames of sensuality. But it is Kelsey, acclaimed for having played the role in various stagings around the world, who passionately imbues the fool with a palpable paranoia and crushing despair that pulls at the heart strings. 

Prolonged scene transitions, in which Rigoletto, before a billowy silk curtain, pantomimes his distress as the sound of thunder attempts to obfuscate set changes, mostly make for awkward pacing and dead time. The final scene empties the room and rewarded my patience, leaving only a corpse beneath a white shroud: the stark simplicity of that image adds to the barren grandeur, which is furthered by the delightful surprise of red rose petals — previously used to evoke Mantua’s romantic life philosophy — strewn across the stage. 

As at the end of Act One, Rigoletto attributes his destiny to the curse. But in my reading, the real tragedy is his inability to control himself and the others around him. “Language is my weapon,” he reflects early on, and over the opera’s two hours and 25 minutes we witness his futile struggle to grasp the words necessary to counteract the ire of his enemies. 

As Rigoletto wept, I became distracted by a lone petal belatedly descending from above. An accident, certainly, but one that offered a reminder of opera’s unpredictable magic: that, even among the grandest of designs, a performance’s final form depends upon these ephemeral moments one calls fate.

Rigoletto runs at the Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts until February 14. More information is available here.

Nirris Nagendrarajah wrote this review as part of Page Turn, a professional development network for emerging arts writers, funded by the Canada Council for the Arts and administered by Neworld Theatre.

Intermission reviews are independent and unrelated to Intermission’s partnered content. Learn more about Intermission’s partnership model here.

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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