Pictures from Figaro’s Wedding

Here are a few of the photographs that Chris Hutcheson took at the preview of excerpts from Figaro’s Wedding last week.

The whole gang

More under the cut…

A very AtG Christmas party

Miriam Khalil as the Governess in last season’s The Turn of the Screw. She was looking sparklier and less spooked last night!

Last night was the Against the Grain Theatre fundraiser at the Norman Felix Gallery.  It was definitely billed as a Christmas party but was probably one of the most Jewish Christmas parties since the one in the stable.  A fair selection of the great and good of the Toronto opera scene turned out together with an even larger sample of the not so great and good, including the lemur and myself.  Topher banged the ivories for a few operatic excerpts and some Christmassy songs.  There was carolling, of a rather higher standard than my old parish church, and drinking; though not necessarily in that order.  There was a small dog.  I think everybody had fun.

Against the Grain Theatre’s season announcement

The following just in from arguably Toronto’s most exciting opera company; Against the Grain Theatre.  So a party, György Kurtág’s Kafka Fragments and Leoš Janáček’s The Diary of One Who Disappeared (with the brilliant Jacquie Woodley) and Figaro’s Wedding; a Toronto centred reworking of the Mozart classic with an orchestra for the first time.  Following on from successes like their Tranzac based La Bohème and a brillian The Turn of the Screw, this looks very exciting.

Full details, links for tickets etc, below the fold.

It is a curious story

Miriam Khalil

Last night was the first night of a four night run for Against the Grain Theatre‘s production of Britten’s The Turn of the Screw.  These are the folks who did La Bohème at the Tranzac and The Seven Deadly Sins in an art gallery.  Last night’s space was only marginally less unconventional.  We were in some upstairs space at the Helen Gardiner Phelan Playhouse reached via the back entrance and lots of stairs.  It was a sort of loft set up so that the performance space was a narrow strip bounded at each end by a door and at the sides by three banked rows of seats.  There was seating for maybe eighty people so it was intimate, even claustrophobic.  Add to the space a few simple props, lights and a fog machine and you have the raw materials for Joel Ivany’s production.