Daddies' girl

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Wayne Glowacki / Winnipeg Free Press Cute couple: Nikki Einfeld and John Tessier star in Manitoba Opera�s The Daughter of the Regiment.

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Einfeld as the spunky orphaned tomboy who�s been raised by a French military regiment.

Pressure? What pressure?

The headliners in Gaetano Donizetti's exuberant French comedy The Daughter of the Regiment, opening Saturday at Manitoba Opera, face inevitable comparison to other performers.

While Fiona Reid rises to the challenge of replacing celebrity cast member Mary Walsh, coloratura soprano Nikki Einfeld once again finds herself tackling a role last sung on the Centennial Concert Hall stage, back in 1991, by local sweetheart Tracy Dahl.

Einfeld is a lively redhead who grew up in Charleswood, had Dahl as a University of Manitoba voice teacher and worked as a nanny to Dahl's children. Two seasons ago, she had to follow in her bubbly mentor's footsteps in The Barber of Seville.

"Every time I come here, I fill these big shoes!" says Einfeld, who is married to a Californian and lives outside San Francisco.

It's Einfeld's first time performing the role of Marie. The character is a spunky orphaned tomboy who's been raised by a French military regiment, meaning she has 23 "dads" who treat her as a mascot.

Marie gets separated from her Tyrolean honey, Tonio, when a long-lost relative tries to transform her into a proper lady and marry her off to a duke. Einfeld understudied the role in 2009 at San Francisco Opera.

As for John Tessier, the Edmonton-born tenor who plays the peasant-turned-soldier Tonio, he has to scale the heights of the 1840 opera's best-known aria, Ah! Mes amis.

It's a famous vocal test because it demands that the singer hit a punishing nine high Cs. It's the showstopper that vaulted Luciano Pavarotti to stardom in the early 1970s, and is now a signature aria for Peruvian tenor Juan Diego Florez.

Tessier, who is on the road 10 months per year and has appeared with MO twice before, says the high-spirited aria is very challenging, but he has the kind of voice that's suited to it.

Our culture seems increasingly obsessed with watching people under pressure and waiting for them to mess up, he notes.

"We're fascinated with reality TV," he says. "We're fascinated with seeing people come apart. That's kind of a dangerous way to think about anything. I just do my job, which is to sing it, and I enjoy doing it."

Einfeld and Tessier have to rank as one of the best-looking couples ever to pair up on the MO stage. Tessier, who won't disclose his age, is headed to Amsterdam next month to play John F. Kennedy in the world premiere of a new opera called Waiting for Miss Monroe. He has four children at home in London, Ont.

Einfeld, who's in her mid-30s, has two daughters aged four and 17 months. She travels with a family friend as her nanny.

Einfeld, an Oak Park High School grad, had a French-immersion education. She says it's great to see Daughter having something of a resurgence, because beyond the perennial Carmen, there aren't many opportunities to sing French opera in North America.

Daughter requires the singers to deliver spoken dialogue (in English), but Einfeld says she's comfortable with that, having done operettas such as The Pirates of Penzance. "Treating it as an actor would treat a play is really important to me," she says.

In many productions of Daughter, Marie wears a dress and is quite feminine from the start. But Einfeld and director Ann Hodges agreed that Marie has been raised by guys and should be a rough-and-tumble, pigtailed tomboy. "Part of the challenge is to strip away girly mannerisms," the soprano says. "I'm throwing bags of potatoes around."

One of the most delightful scenes comes in the second act, when Marie has miserably been made over as a frilly young lady and suffers through a singing lesson. She keeps breaking into the regimental song that she relished in the military camp in Act I.

"It's one of the only examples of opera singing . . . where you actually get to make fun of the opera voice," Einfeld says.

alison.mayes@freepress.mb.ca

Opera Preview

The Daughter of the Regiment

Manitoba Opera

Centennial Concert Hall

Saturday and April 27 at 8 p.m.; Tuesday at 7 p.m.

Tickets $42 to $130 at 944-8824 or manitobaopera.mb.ca

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition April 19, 2012 D1