Modern life and an updated opera walk into a national park.
#UncleJohn, the new collaborative, modernized opera inspired by Mozart’s Don Giovanni, involves Calgarians off to a wedding in Banff, with a couple of Parks Canada employees as extras for added authenticity.
The Banff Centre has been working with Toronto-based Against the Grain Theatre in preparing the opera performance premiering at the birthplace of Canada’s national parks – the Cave and Basin National Historic Site.
Set in present day Banff, #UncleJohn tells the story of Masetto and Zerlina, two Calgarians who are tying the knot at the Cave and Basin National Historic Site. It runs Aug. 1-3 at the Cave and Basin Historic Site.
According to The Banff Centre, “Known to his friends as the suave ‘Uncle John,’ his ability to seduce many conquests with charm and good looks is unrivalled. He’s off to a wedding – a setting that always allows him to work his magic. But this particular wedding presents a new challenge: Uncle John decides to go after the bride.”
The cast features eight young professional singers from across the country who will perform the contemporary open air opera, featuring a new English libretto written by Against the Grain Theatre’s artistic director Joel Ivany. Ivany recently won at the Dora Mavor Moore Awards for Figaro’s Wedding, a modernization of Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro. Ivany and Against the Grain Theatre have now given Don Giovanni the same treatment for creating #UncleJohn.
“It’s kind of mixing the old, which is Mozart, and the new because it’s a brand new story with a new English text,” said Ivany. “There’s something about the character Don Giovanni and the music, and what we’re doing and saying is, ‘let’s do something different with it and contemporize it specifically for a Banff audience and translate it for our time now and probably in five years this version will probably be a bit outdated.’
“Against the Grain Theatre is based in Toronto and that’s where the Canadian Opera Company is based as well and they’ve been following us and supporting us from the beginning, It’s new ideas, but with quality artists. That’s how that partnership happened.
“I know The Banff Centre wanted to think differently with their opera program and someone heard last season about our production of The Marriage of Figaro that we called Figaro’s Wedding with the principles of the characters, but with brand new skin and clothes of a new story. So we showed up on their radar and they invited us to explore something new and workshop a new piece and so far it’s worked out really well.
“With modernizing the plot of a classic opera, technology is going to play a role in the revamping. Twitter, Facebook and iPhones ... and we even have a laptop. In the original, Leporello has a catalogue where he sings about Don Giovanni’s conquests and he has a big book ... whereas in our version, he’s using an iPad.”
