I have seen a number of shows in the past week or so, starting in Victoria with a fine Pacific Opera Victoria production of Mozart’s Don Giovanni. We all may know the story of the inveterate seducer of thousands of women, who eventually pays the price for his lechery, ending up literally in hell (where George Bernard Shaw will follow up the story with his own postscript play). Set in modern times, the show was well-directed by Maria Lamont, who effectively brings the story into the present day. The simple sets, designed by Christina Poddubiuk, worked well, with columns and Italianate archways taking us into the appropriate setting. The lead singers were all excellent, in particular Daniel Okulitch’s rakish Giovanni, who fights to the death for his libertarian lifestyle, and Aviva Fortunata’s Donna Anna, along with Tracy Cantin’s Donna Elvira and Cecile Muhire’s appealing Zerlina, all of his rejected lovers expressing both their regret for falling for him alongside the lingering longing they cannot help but feel. The POV orchestra, under Timothy Vernon, sounded terrific, and the chorus looked and sounded dramatically caught up in the action Mozart spins so well.

My next show took me across the country to Toronto, and Soulpepper Theatre’s production of Dominique Morisseau’s play Pipeline. Originally produced by Lincoln Center Theater in 2017, New York City, Pipeline was commissioned by Steppenwolf Theatre Company, Chicago. With a pedigree like this, and with the subject matter of personal interest to me, I was really looking forward to seeing this production, directed by Weyni Mengesha and featuring a majority Black cast. The plot tells the story of divorced mother Nya (Akosua Amo-Adem)–whose son Omari (Tony Ofori) has gotten into trouble at school after losing his temper and pushing a teacher–and her very real fears for his future and safety in America. While Nya is a public school teacher, a tough job in America, she sends her son to a private school, and is pinning all her hopes for his future on his succeeding in that setting. The play follows this situation and introduces us to Omari’s girlfriend Jasmine (a delightfully ‘teenage girl’ Chelsea Russell), long-suffering fellow teacher Laurie (the always strong Kirsten Thomson), ex-husband and absent father Xavier (Kevin Stanchard) and school security guard, plus potential love interest for Nya, Dun (Mazin Elsadig). I found the play to be well-written and the acting competent, if not inspired, throughout this 90 minute performance. But I also found my attention drifting at times, less than captivated by what I was witnessing. I heard from a fellow theatregoing friend that the Lincoln Centre production, which was available for live streaming during the pandemic, was sensational. This production left me wanting more.

Next, my quick trip to Toronto took me to a superb production of Verdi’s great opera La Traviata. Based on The Lady of the Camellias by Alexandre Dumas fils, it tells the tale of the tragic Violetta, a Parisian courtesan who finds true love, and an escape from the emptiness of her high society life, in the arms of Alfredo Germont. Of course, this being opera, she loses her love (for a while), and eventually her life to the great killer of the 18th and 19th centuries, tuberculosis. In this production, a remount of the same opera last seen in 2015 at the COC, director Arin Arbus captures the passion and beauty of Verdi’s music in the dramatization and especially the strong lead performances by Amina Edris as Violetta, who sang beautifully throughout, and Matthew Polenzani as Alfredo. Strong also was Simone Piazzola as Alfredo’s judgmental father Giorgio Germont. The costumes by Cait O’Connor were suitably ravishing, especially in the party scenes, with O’Connor adding some giant puppets into the mix as well, to great effect. The lighting was lovely, as designed by Marcus Doshi. The chorus looked and sounded splendid, and so did the orchestra, under the baton of conductor Johannes Debus. All in all, it was a three hour dip into an opera that is so much revived for good reason; its glorious romantic music will move you and its story of tragic love will touch your heart, as all good art must do.

My fourth and final recent performance was a virtual one; Robert Lepage’s virtual reality experience The Library at Night, based on the book of the same title by Alberto Manguel. The experience is advertised as “an immersive and sensory virtual-reality journey that whisks you away to ten libraries, real or imagined, throughout time and across the globe – from Mexico to Japan, Copenhagen, Sarajevo and beyond.” Visitors are greeted by a guide who leads us into (what else?) a library, outside of which we see rain falling down the windows and hear Alberto Manguel introduce us to his lifelong love affair with libraries and everything they both hold and represent. We are then taken into another room, seated and given instructions on how to put on and operate our virtual reality headsets. The interface is quite intuitive, and I was able to navigate to the ten different library sites worldwide with ease. Each library offers a 3-D version of the library, in which the viewer can turn and look in all directions. Actors move soundlessly in and out of the space while music plays and Manguel’s voice orients us to what we are seeing. So we travel from the Ancient Library of Alexandria, to the destroyed Sarajevo Library, to the National Library of Canada (with an incredible animation emerging from the pages of Audabon’s The Birds of America (the highlight of the experience). I have librarians in my family; both my mother and my sister are retired librarians, and my sister now teaches at the UBC Library School. I have always believed in the value of libraries as bastions of knowledge-keeping and democracy–where else can you get anything in our world for free?–and this VR experience brought back to me both the beauty of libraries as architectural spaces and the profundity of what they represent for humanity and its better nature.