COC season features world premieres, new performance venue

A world premiere used to be a once-in-a-blue-moon event at the Canadian Opera Company (COC). This season, audiences will get two in the span of three months.

The pair of new works — Ian Cusson and Colleen Murphy’s “Fantasma” and Teiya Kasahara’s “The Queen In Me” — join revivals of “La Traviata,” and “The Magic Flute” in a truncated, yet ambitious in-person season.

In light of the provincial COVID-19 restrictions that came into effect Jan. 5, the COC announced it was cancelling in-person performances of “Madama Butterfly,” which was slated to begin Feb. 4. The four other productions in the season are still planned to continue in-person, with single tickets going on sale to the general public Feb. 22, with donors and subscribers getting first dibs on Feb. 15.

COC’s new general director Perryn Leech hopes the slate of diverse offerings will attract new audiences and bring stalwart patrons back to the opera after nearly two years of digital programming.

For Leech, a former lighting technician turned arts administrator who comes to Toronto from the Houston Grand Opera, new operatic works will play a key role in COC seasons for years to come. He hopes this new pillar of programming will reinvigorate the challenged art form and help the company reach out to a younger and more diverse crowd.

“People have the absolute right to call us out for being very old-fashioned. We need to recognize that the current repertoire has been very Caucasian centric,” said Leech. “We want to tell stories for people that haven’t been heard, haven’t had a voice on stage. I think the COC can be part of an evolution of the art form that has continued to grow over the past 450 years.”

“Fantasma,” the first of the two world premiere productions, follows young friends Léa and Ivy, who stumble upon a dead child while in a haunted manor at a dilapidated small-town carnival. Composed by former COC composer-in-residence Ian Cusson and with a libretto by award-winning playwright Colleen Murphy, the chamber opera weaves broad humour with tender pathos, beauty with tragedy into a tale that explores themes of courage, compassion and loss.

Cusson and Murphy began working on the COC-commissioned piece in 2018. It would have premiered in 2020 following a series of workshops, if not for the pandemic. It will now run from March 9 to 13 and will feature alumni and artists from the COC Ensemble Studio.

The 45-minute opera was developed especially with young audiences in mind, Cusson says.

“Often, we think of children as not having the capacity to feel deeply about things. And so we create these kinds of saccharine works for them,” said Cusson. “What was critical to both Colleen and I was that we affirm the capacities of younger people to experience and feel a complete set of human emotions.”

Unlike “Fantasma,” which was developed and produced in-house, the second world premiere of the season is a COC co-production with three Toronto-based indie arts companies: Amplified Opera, Nightwood Theatre and Theatre Gargantua.

“The Queen In Me,” created and performed by multidisciplinary artist Teiya Kasahara, is told from the perspective of the iconic Queen of the Night from Mozart’s “The Magic Flute.”

In Kasahara’s solo show, the titular queen rebels against her proscribed narrative. Instead of launching into her infamous aria “Der Hölle Rache,” the Queen sheds her evil veneer and begins advocating for the various soprano characters, like herself, who have been pigeonholed into archetypal operatic tropes. In doing so, she also speaks up for the hundreds of performers who have stepped into her shoes over the centuries-worth of “Magic Flute” productions.

“This character eventually was able to kind of advocate for me and my complex identity as well,” said Kasahara, a queer, trans/non-binary artist who is also the co-founder of Amplified Opera.

“What is so frustrating and also kind of bittersweet about opera is that the music is so glorious. It moves me and so many others,” they said. “But the subject material, the characters that are being portrayed and how we’re continuing to portray them — especially in some traditional productions — are often harming those who are playing those roles and may be potentially harming audience members witnessing these sometimes very sexist, racist, homophobic, transphobic dramas.”

Kasahara first developed the work while part of the emerging creators unit at Buddies in Bad Times Theatre. They hope the piece will push the art form forward and serve as a critique to the socially-constructed binaries inherent in the canon and in society at large.

“Opera is an art form that is alive,” said Kasahara. “It is growing, it is changing and it is evolving.”

Both “The Queen In Me” and “Fantasma” will serve as the inaugural productions at the new Canadian Opera Company Theatre, at 227 Front St. East. The east end venue, which previously was the COC’s administrative and rehearsal space, was revitalized during the pandemic and will now act as the company’s secondary performance venue for expanded programming.

The Four Seasons Centre will continue to host the COC’s mainstage shows, including this season’s productions of “La Traviata,” and “The Magic Flute.”

Leech says the new venue will augment the COC’s main performance space and offer greater programming flexibility, particularly for new works and experimental pieces.

“It’s a space that is not an opera house,” he said. “It allows us to be a little bit more experimental with some of the repertoire.”

“Fantasma” runs at the Canadian Opera Company Theatre from March 9 to 13. “The Queen In Me” runs at the Canadian Opera Company Theatre from June 2 to 4. Single tickets go on sale Feb. 22. For more information, visit coc.ca.