After 30 years in the opera business, Charles Barber expects the newest opera he’s working on will be “not a flop.”
The music director and conductor’s careful optimism is buoyed by the response workshops of Pauline received in October.
“One of our singers really got into it and at the end of this particular number was in tears. So was Margaret [Atwood], so was Tobin [Stokes], so was everyone,” said Barber of City Opera Vancouver. “And if you can do that in rehearsal six months out, you know that something is clicking and something is true.”
The world premiere of Atwood’s first opera, Pauline, happens at the York Theatre, May 23, with Atwood in attendance.
Pauline delves into the cancer and morphine-addled last days of biracial poet and performer Pauline Johnson.
“In the first half of her stage show, she came out dressed as a Mohawk princess with the name Tekahionwake and she did her kind of blood-curdling Indian war and love poetry, and people were shocked and amazed and thrilled,” Barber said. “She was a very, very big name in her day.”
To further challenge stereotypes, Johnson would emerge in the second half dressed as a proper Victorian woman and recite her Victorian poetry.
Johnson was born in Brantford, Ont. in 1861. Her mother was a Quaker Englishwoman and her father was a Mohawk chief of the Six Nations. Her mother educated her in Western literature and Johnson made a name for herself performing across North America and Great Britain before she moved to Vancouver in 1909 where she died of breast cancer at age 51. She’s the only known person to be buried legitimately in Stanley Park.
Atwood, 74, learned about Johnson in school in the 1940s and highlighted Johnson’s work when she included her in her edition of The Oxford Book of Canadian Verse in English in the early 1980s. Atwood wrote a grand opera about Johnson for a Toronto company in the 1990s, but that production never happened, so Atwood leapt at the chance to recreate the opera for Vancouver’s chamber opera company.
Rose-Ellen Nichols, a 33-year-old mezzo-soprano who plays Johnson, doesn’t recall learning about the mixed-race performer when she grew up in Pender Harbour on the Sunshine Coast. But the Coast Salish woman, who holds a master’s in opera from the University of B.C., feels excited to perform the title role in Pauline.
“You’re putting together two great Canadian women of literature and they’re coming together so seamlessly and beautiful,” Nichols said.
Atwood’s words meld with those from Johnson’s letters and poems, lifted by Stokes’ lyrical compositions. Barber says Atwood’s libretto is succinct, intelligent and by turns bitterly funny and poignant.
Barber promises “inspired” staging, noting esteemed director Norman Armour has two aboriginal designers shaping projections and hangings. Mara Gottler of Bard on the Beach fame has fashioned the costumes, aboriginal artist Marianne Nicolson is responsible for set and visual design and Jessie Award-winning John Webber for lighting design.
It was Nichols who brought Atwood and Stokes to tears in October.
“It really means a lot to her,” Barber said. “I didn’t realize how much until she… talked about this before an audience of about 80 people, many of them were First Nations, and she talked with wet eyes.”
Nichols knows what it’s like to travel far from home to follow one’s artistic dreams. “[Johnson] made a choice in her life that that’s what she wanted to do,” Nichols said. “I’m doing the same kind of thing.”
For Atwood, the opera about Johnson took 20 years to hit the stage, for City Opera, eight. But Barber says it’s the perfect story for Vancouver and Canada, now.
“It’s premised on the idea of dual identity,” he said. “It then pivots on the very Canadian question, who am I? Am I English, am I Mohawk, or can I learn how to be both.”
Pauline runs May 23 to 31. Details at cityoperavancouver.com.
