Opera company tempts audiences with sweet treat Indie performance group hopes audiences will eat up Hansel and Gretel at the WAG By: Ben Waldman Posted: 4:18 PM CDT Wednesday, Aug. 21, 2024

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The Manitoba Underground Opera is headed into the woods for its latest production, transforming the Winnipeg Art Gallery’s Muriel Richardson Auditorium into the vast forest setting of Hansel and Gretel.

Executive director Brendan McKeen hopes audiences will eat it up.

Since 2011, the indie company has taken each of its shows on the road, transforming each successive location — be it a church, a gallery, or the Manitoba Legislative Building — into a temporary opera house.

For Hansel and Gretel, a classic opera performed in English and based on the Germanic fairy tale, director Jillian Willems (who helmed Walk&Talk’s vampire musical Afterlight last fall and co-starred in this spring’s Dry Cold production of Merrily We Roll Along) will invite visitors to travel through a wilderness of dynamic projections designed by lighting artist jaymez, whose eclectic style has seen him collaborate with companies such as Shakespeare in the Ruins and electronic musical acts such as Venetian Snares and Crystal Castles.

To establish a feeling of immersion, the company attempts to remove as many boundaries as possible between performer and patron. To that end, jaymez’s projections will provide the setting, covering the stage and the audience’s left-side wall with virtually mapped backdrops.

The projections, paired with the auditorium’s swivelling chairs, are meant to allow the audience to see the forest and the trees while following the trail of narrative breadcrumbs.

The human voice fills the space, says McKeen, who founded the company in 2008 as an undergraduate at the University of Manitoba, where he studied the flute.

Darting between the digital branches, accompanied by a string quintet conducted by the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra’s Monica Chen, are Grace Budoloski as Gretel; Carmen Harris as Hansel; Kelly Robinson and Mihnea Nitu as their frazzled parents; Ashley Boychuk in the roles of the Sandman and Dew Fairy; and Geneva Halverson as the witch with a juvenile appetite.

Julie Savard and Darryl Strain (violins), John Sellick (viola), Patricia Vanuci (cello) and Taras Pivniak (bass) build the soundscape.

One of the overarching principles of the company is to create leadership and performance opportunities “for people who are ready to take them” without waiting around for those chances to come from larger performance groups, McKeen says.

That ethos was affirmed from the start, when McKeen and his undergraduate cohort assembled a small-scale orchestra for a concert at the U of M’s St. John’s College in 2008.

Hungry for a chance to build something from the ground up, McKeen, a self-described bad singer who went on to earn a master’s degree in orchestral conducting from Northwestern University, put together what was essentially a variety hour, inviting friends to sing whatever they were working on and for which they could find sheet music.

Those spring concerts led to a summer festival structure, that in turn led last year to the company’s first traditional season, entitled Odyssey.

The series — consisting of an original opera (Laura Gow’s The Mansplaining Division) at the Pyramid Cabaret; Castor et Pollux, performed outside the St. Boniface Cathedral; and Verdi’s Il Corsaro on the deck of the Nonsuch in the Manitoba Museum — was a complete success, McKeen says: every show sold out.

In the much larger Richardson Auditorium, a sell out would require the movement of 319 swivel seats and five wheelchair-accessible spots — a true test of the company’s broadening reach. McKeen has high hopes that crowds will snag tickets ($22 to $35) for the 90-minute production.

This season has so far included an adaptation of D.H. Lawrence’s short story Rocking Horse Winner, directed by Alissa Watson at the Millennium Centre, a former bank.

In her review for Opera Canada, Holly Harris praised the company for its “inspired choice of venue” given “its characters’ lust for money, and lack thereof.”

The company will close its season with an 18+ production of Jacques Offenbach’s The Tales of Hoffmann (Sept. 18-29), staged under the direction of Matthew Paris-Irvine as a drag opera beneath the lights of Club 200, a downtown gay bar since 1988.

More information can be found at manitobaundergroundopera.com.

ben.waldman@winnipegfreepress.com