BANFF, Alberta – Veronika Krausas’ and André Alexis’ conventional yet unconventional Ghost Opera had its sold-out premiere on May 24 at the Banff Centre’s 950-seat Eric Harvie Theatre. The collaboration between the Centre, Calgary Opera, and the Calgary-based Old Trout Puppet Workshop featured Calgary Opera’s eight emerging artists, 11 musicians, and a host of puppeteers.
The 95-minute piece tells a modified version of an ancient haunted-house story, revived by Canadian novelist Alexis and presented as a dramma giocoso. The unconventional element was the use of exquisitely crafted puppets that, together with their human cohorts, delivered the oftentimes wacky, but ultimately morbid, tale of murder, revenge, and suicide.
A rich old lady, Philippa, is confronted by her deadbeat nephew looking for another handout. She doesn’t exactly refuse, but the parasite loses patience and stabs his aunt, then throws her body into a well. (This is easy to do when the body is a puppet.) The source of the story is ancient Greece, a culture that took burial rites very seriously. The soul of a body not properly disposed of cannot cross into the underworld to find its peace. Philippa, left to rot at the bottom of a well, is stranded. And thus ensues the haunting.
The greedy nephew pitches the property to a family of four who like the discount he’s offering. But even before the transaction closes, strange things begin to happen. The family Pomeranian begins to fly, a bit of stage business that broke up the audience, as did much of the action in the longer first act of the two-act production. The puppeteer gave the stuffed pooch some Cirque de Soleil flair, and the crowd loved it.
Some of the humor lay in Alexis’ fine libretto, which traces the arc of the dark sit-com-like early plot without creaky excursions into forced rhyming or needless exposition. As in much contemporary opera, a lot of the dialogue is recit, and Alexis’ phrases seemed easy to sing. Much of the humor, though, certainly came from the fact that each character was both a human singer and a puppet avatar manipulated by one or two puppeteers who jerked and glided their charges about the proscenium stage while their associated singer delivered the operatic coloring of the plot.
This arrangement produced clusters of bodies, both animate and inanimate, where ordinarily we’d see just one character delivering the story in music. The effect, especially in Act 1, was often chaotic, not because of anything directors Judd Palmer, Peter Balkwell, and Pityu Kenderes did (the blocking was focused and fluid), but because the crowding of so much core and peripheral business scattered attention.
There were crossover questions as well. In Act 1, Adam Harris arffed and woofed the role of Bennington, the intuitive family pet who knew a leeching relative when he smelled one, but Harris also scooted about the stage on all fours beside the puppeteer handling the stuffed pup, confusing to a degree the duty of the human and the prop. In quieter moments, though, when a puppet held the frame and the singer stood off a ways to sing its part, the operatic feel of the piece was strong and unequivocally serious and coherent.
This more staid effect was especially evident in the briefer second act, when the relationship between Philippa and the new tenant, the old philosopher Athenodorus, developed. (Baritone Jonah Spungin was a standout in the role, although all the singing was accomplished.) This rationalist boasted that he was not susceptible to metaphysical nonsense as he negotiated with the now exasperated owners, still desperate, after decades of ghostly intrusions, to unload the creepy property. The puppets the Trouts crafted for the philosopher evoked the gravitas of a classical bust. In the final scenes, when he and the equally evocative old lady puppet interacted, there were moments when the identity of the character as a puppet or a person became irrelevant. The essence of the opera, in its dramatic guise, was transparent. Where there had been much giddy laughter from the audience in Act 1, there was a subdued silence for much of the culminating act, owing partly to the dark ending and partly to the more restrained staging.
Krausas, who was raised in Calgary and teaches theory and composition at USC’s Thornton School of Music in Los Angeles, has written several chamber operas, including a segment of the well-reviewed experimental piece Hopscotch and The Mortal Thoughts of Lady Macbeth, which has received numerous performances throughout the United States. The music for Ghost Opera serves multiple purposes. Mostly it sets the atmosphere for the 18-scene work. The writing is compact, with many exposed moments for solo instruments that draw attention to the score in musically self-contained ways while still serving the larger narrative purpose. Krausas has an affinity for percussion (she wrote a piece for snare drum and narrator in 1999), and she gave the two percussionists many interesting pulsing effects.
But she also inserted moments of broad musical comedy and austere, reverential choral writing in the second-act ekphora [funeral procession], ushering Philippa’s bones in a procession toward the River Styx and her eternal rest. And the Monty-Pythonesque gravediggers’ scene in Act 1, with its oom-pah-pah rhythm black humor and unpolished choreography, was hilarious. The ensemble, dressed in drab, tattered coverings with puppet heads perched atop their own heads, sang of their indifference to life’s comedy and tragedy: “Good and evil, rich and poor, alive or dead, ghost or nightlight or ball of fire. How wonderful to be alive! How wonderful to be dead.”
The set was simple: a truncated spiral staircase with a platform and the well on top, some narrow drapes that passed for columns, and a large classical statue in Act 1 that the nephew passed off as Philippa’s body in a sham funeral. The production was fittingly low-tech, given the prominence of the Old Trouts’ artistry in holding center stage.
The orchestra, led with nuanced control by Kimberley-Ann Bartczak, sat stage right, and handled its role impeccably.
Ghost Opera moves to Calgary for eight nights beginning with a preview on May 29. For tickets and information, go here.
Bill Rankin is an Edmonton-based freelance writer who covers classical music and opera for Opera Canada and the American Record Guide, among other publications.
