Opera Review: Dead Man Walking

MONTREAL ? Composer Jake Heggie and librettist Terrence McNally somehow wrote a time machine. Dead Man Walking is opera as it was experienced a long time ago: relevant, familiar, and with a tune you can sing in the shower (where it may make you sad.)

Once, this might have meant a farce on relations between masters and servants set to a suppressed popular play, but unlike Figaro we don?t have to search for seriousness in Dead Man Walking ? it drowns us with a flood of tragedy and morality.

Its dry humour, like its few spoken lines, go off like magnums in the desert.

This opera tries to change your mind and Saturday?s Quebec premiere wisely emphasized its dramatic qualities. Heggie is no Mozart; he tends toward effectively lightweight music and muddles anything more complex than a duet. The cast were all first-rate actors and the rented sets from 2006 an unimaginative but imposing presence.

It is not the season?s best music ? though conductor Wayne Marshall drew an unfamiliar big and attentive sound out of the pit ? but it could change your idea of what opera is, and you should see it.

Is he guilty or not? The movie lets us wonder, and arguments against capital punishment are often based on the horror of killing an innocent man, but the opera shows us Joseph De Rocher committing at least one terrible crime. So the justice of his punishment becomes less important than the morality of ?legal homicide.? That?s what they put on the death certificates; that?s what Sister Helen wants us to think about, and that?s what the opera does better than either the movie or the book.

?tienne Dupuis and Allyson McHardy were a phenomenal pair as death row De Rocher and Sister Helen, who starts out as his pen pal and ends up his spiritual lover. McHardy has a mezzo like marmalade ? you like it or you don?t. I did, but I like bitters, and Depuis? fine?birch baritone?is less impressive that his onstage presence and chemistry.

Kimberly Barber?s shapely mezzo stood out as De Rocher?s frightened, confused, and still proud mother, while the rest of the cast were a wash of unusually fine acting, made easier by the libretto?s straightforwardness and its many quotes of dialogue from the book.

The lighting was the night?s only damaging weakness, as subtle as a sad corner of Nuit Blanche, but frankly, it was not an evening for analysis.

I?ve never seen so many tears (the good kind, not the David Pomeroy kind) or heard a first-timer wonder if McHardy?s Sister Helen was sassy enough ? this, after an hour and a half of introductory wrestling with the high weirdness of opera. It?s staggering. The last time this kind of thing was normal Napoleon wasn?t a cake yet.

This is opera headed in the right direction, toward its audience. I wonder if the audience will head to the opera.

Dead Man Walking continues March 12, 14, and 16 at Place des Arts.

lev@yesyesyes.ca?

Twitter: @yeslev

Source: http://www.montrealgazette.com/entertainment/Dead+Walking+opera+people/8076241/story.html

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