Review: Vancouver Opera’s Tosca has chills, thrills and spectacle

Vancouver Opera’s new all-Italian, all-favourites season got a strong launch Saturday night at the Queen Elizabeth Theatre.

Director Brenna Corner’s production of Puccini’s Tosca features Joyce El-Khoury as the heroine Tosca, David Pomeroy as her love interest Cavarodossi, and Gregory Dahl as the villainous Baron Scarpia.

Theatre buffs often talk about “well-made” plays: conventional but well crafted works, and reliable entertainment. The same can be said of opera.

Puccini and his near-contemporary Jules Massenet were reliable sources of tales of consistent appeal at the turn of the last century. With a couple of exceptions, Massenet’s work has faded from the scene; Puccini, on the other hand, graces most opera seasons.

Although Tosca isn’t quite up there with Madama Butterfly or La Bohème in surefire appeal, it’s awfully close. And for good reason: this operatic retread of a play by French dramatist Victorien Sardou, finely tailored for the inimitable Sara Bernhardt, has chills, thrills, spectacle, and sheer melodrama in abundance.

Corner’s production refuses contemporary strategies to redefine period and locale to render a piece “more relevant” — hard to achieve with Tosca, set so firmly in Napoleonic era Rome. Designer Scott Reid’s set is attractive: three distinct venues representing the basilica of Sant’Andrea della Valle, the private office of Scarpia, and the Castel Sant’Angelo (used for centuries as a prison) are created from the bones of a unit set.

Michael Walton’s lighting is serviceable, often intriguing, as in the treatment of Cavarodossi’s offstage torture by Scarpia’s minions. Costumes on loan from Toronto’s Canadian Opera Company conform to the average operagoer’s sartorial conception of the moment. Conner’s blocking is efficient in both the moments of high drama and the crowd scene that makes a splendid end to Act One.

VO Music Director Jacques Lacombe’s approach to the score is just as traditional as the staging. Where his predecessor, Jonathan Darlington, gave us an especially nuanced interpretation of La Bohème in the spring, Lacombe’s presents an intensely theatrical reading.

It’s exactly right for Tosca.

Aside from the grand Act One set piece where one of operas’s greatest villains lets us in on his game plan while a choir intones a Te Deum, Tosca is focused the three super principal roles. Scarpia was sung with equal parts swagger and menace by Gregory Dahl, a great performance of a spectacular part. Cavarodossi, a painter caught up in political crossfire, was sung by tenor David Pomery, whose big voice and understanding of the Italian tenor idiom gave his reading power and presence. Joyce El-Khoury was everything you could wish for as Tosca, able to match a certain innocence with worldly experience. Her voice is complex and rich, and she can created the intensity needed to match two big male voices in her portrayal of a grand diva prepared to do almost anything for love.

Choosing Tosca for the season opener was a wise decision.