Die Walküre, Edmonton Opera. Photo supplied
By Liz Nicholls, .ca
When we last saw them, a year ago in Richard Wagner’s Das Rheingold on the Citadel’s Maclab stage, the gods were poised uneasily on the doom-laden threshold of their new home, Valhalla.
To help support .ca YEG theatre coverage, click here.
The Rhine maidens were still pretty cut up about the theft of their gold buried under the river. The curse of a magic ring fashioned from the stolen had already taken a toll, with more to come…. Face it, Wagner really knew how to leave a cliff-hanger for the sequel.
And here it is. As promised, Edmonton Opera returns again to theatrical setting of the Maclab — instead of their usual cavernous 2500-seat home base at the Jube — with Die Walküre, the second of Wagner’s monumental four-opera Ring Cycle, and the third to be written.
Unless you’re a die-hard Wagnerian you’re off the hook for not knowing exactly how a plot of dramatically juicy complication unravels — a brother and sister madly in love with each other, a baby, a really special sword, a sister act, a warrior maiden surrounded by a ring of fire. But there’s music you can’t not know in Die Walküre. Who can forget those born-again Wagnerians Elmer Fudd as Siegfried and Bugs Bunny as Brünhilde in their timeless “Kill the wabbit!” chase sequence in What’s Opera Doc?, set to The Ride of the Valkyries from Act III of the opera we’ll see starting Thursday.
designer Andy Moro
“If there is an iconic work of art on the planet, this is it,” laughs theatre (and opera) designer Andy Moro. “Marvel, movies, Norse mythology — this is it, man. Everybody taps into that stuff somehow!”
If you saw Peter Hinton’s production of Das Rheingold last year, in Edmonton Opera’s 60th anniversary season, you’ll have seen Moro’s striking design bringing an epic opera into an up-close 685-seat theatre with the audience wrapped around the stage. The exuberantly articulate Calgary-based Indigenous artist is back to apply his wits to Die Walküre, a production directed by EO artistic director Joel Ivany. And on a break from setting lighting cues in the Maclab, Moro talks about “the challenges in doing an opera with this scale, grandeur, power, this kind of gravitas, on a thrust stage, a truly theatrical, Shakespearean, environment….”
Moro, who talks fast and with built-in exclamation marks, calls this nine-singer 18-musician adaptation by the British composer Jonathan Dove “a hybrid of pop concert, fashion show, opera, theatre! If you’re in the front row you’re going to get singer spirit on your face. It’s wild! It’s cool! It kicks the doors open to being creative!”
“You’re always pushing against time and resources,” as Moro points out. That’s nothing new. But when you’re re-locating Wagner to a theatre with a thrust stage, surrounded by the audience, the ante is upped on challenges. “What about sight lines?” for one thing. “And where does the orchestra go?”
“Why can’t we see the orchestra in opera? I want to see those guys,” he declares. For Hinton’s Das Rheingold, the musicians occupied an upper level in the Wagnerian cosmology Moro designed for the Maclab. The central stage configuration for that Ring Cycle opener was … the ring. “This time “the orchestra is in right in the centre in a cool upstage area,” Moro says. “We’ve kept the architecture, got rid of all the furniture, and stripped it bare, and white…. We’ve moved the rings around. And it’s as if we’re looking at the essence of that world, at its most raw.”
Die Walküre, Edmonton Opera. Photo supplied
The circular platform on which we saw Wotan, the CEO of the gods, waking up from a rumpled bed in an Edmonton hotel room in 1964 (a first for Wagner I think we can say) is there for Die Walküre. “But I’ve updated it,” says the designer, “and cracked it in the middle so there’s a chasm…. If Das Rheingold was a one-night fever-dream of the entire cycle, now we’re in the dream.”
There’s something dream-like, too, about the Windsor native’s own story — an improvised route into theatre design that’s a true original, full of impulsive left turns. Moro started as a visual artist who “loved sculpture. I was working in 3D but I didn’t know anything about theatre yet.” That introduction came in Toronto via his partner at the time, a contemporary dancer. And then there was the happenstance that sculpture at the Ontario College of Art was fully subscribed, but they had space in the glass program. So Moro was a glass artist for a couple of years before a field trip to a glass mentor’s studio shared by the great Canadian theatre designer Michael Levine changed his direction. Moro was enchanted by Levine’s design maquettes.
But the “real start of it” he says of a theatre design career that has taken him across the country to theatres of every size and shape, happened in a brief stint at the Banff Centre, an artist training institution at the time. And grand opera was involved. By day, there was mentorship with the greats in Canadian design; by night he was a crew member for “big operas, giant sets, big casts.” These days, “teaching at the National Theatre School, I see that the pedagogy does count. I’m not gonna lie; there have been times when I wish I’d just learned this instead of having to figure out things the hard way,” he says cheerfully.
Dylan Thomas-Bouchier, Cheyenne Scott, Tai Amy Grauman, Shyanne Duquette, Todd Houseman in The Herd, Citadel Theatre. Photo by Nanc Price.
Edmonton audiences who saw his stunning work in the premiere of Kenneth T. Williams’ The Herd at the Citadel in 2022 will appreciate that Moro’s is a career that has leaned heavily into new work (“my favourite!”). He and his partner, the notable playwright and theatre artist Tara Beagan (Deer Woman) are co-directors of the activist Indigenous theatre Article 11. Currently they’re partnering with Toronto’s Necessary Angel and Downstage Theatre in Calgary on a new Beagan piece Nice White Lady. Article 11, he says, is basically the two of us and whoever we bring in on a project…. We were flying pretty high when COVID hit,” with a touring show on the international festival circuit that took them to Edinburgh, Melbourne, Sydney, Wellington New Zealand. Lately they’re been venturing into film (a screen version of Deer Woman is in the works).
From the start Moro worked with such theatre innovators as Daniel MacIvor, “the first person who hired me,” and Michael Hollingsworth of VideoCabaret in Toronto: “all artists who understand you need to all be in the room working together to create, from the ground up….” The example of MacIvor has lingered with Moro. “He calls himself an essentialist. If you don’t have 10 reasons why that stuff is onstage right now, get rid of it…. Every moment has to matter in every way you can think of!” Moro is down with that.
The opera part of his career began with Hinton’s production of Missing (by the Indigenous artist Marie Clements), which premiered on the West Coast. And lately he and Hinton have the idea of touring it, in a concert version. As an art form, opera continues to attract him, “both for its scale and its intimacy…. I’m in a sweet spot (with this chamber version of Die Walküre). I’d love to do more!” Not least it’s because “I have so much respect for singers. Like dancers, “these are super-physically-based practices. So Intense.”
Moro searches for an analogy. “It’s cherry blossoms! Everyone goes WOW, and then they’re gone and we live in their memory. There’s something about the intensity of beauty that people will flock to as we become more and more digitized,” he argues. “You jump off the cliff towards the beauty of it, the being IN it, and think of pursuing the goal instead of feeling the barriers.”
PREVIEW
Die Walküre
Edmonton Opera
By: Richard Wagner, arranged by Jonathan Dove
Directed by: Joel Ivany
Conducted by: Russell Braun
Starring: Scott Rumble, Anna Pompeeva, Jaclyn Grossman, Neil Craighead, Catherine Daniel, Giles Tomkins, Leila Kirves, Hannah Crawford, Rachael McAuley
Where: Citadel Maclab Theatre
Running: Thursday, Saturday, plus June 9, 10, 12, 13
Tickets: edmontonopera.com
