REVIEW: La Reine-garçon hits like an avalanche at the COC
Midway through a corpse dissection, a realization strikes René Descartes, prompting him to hurl a baritone melody into the cavernous Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts: “Je pense, donc je suis!”
That endearingly on-the-nose exclamation is one of the goofier moments from composer Julien Bilodeau’s opera La Reine-garçon, which takes care to mix the intellectual with the accessible throughout. Arriving in Toronto after its world premiere in Montreal, this co-production between the Canadian Opera Company and the Opéra de Montréal is eminently watchable, often moving with a sprightliness that belies the dreary contours of its gloomy, crystalline aesthetic.
La Reine-garçon marks a return to familiar snow drifts for librettist Michel Marc Bouchard. The opera shares its protagonist — the 17th-century Queen Christina of Sweden, famously raised by her father as a boy — with Bouchard’s play Christina, the Girl King, which debuted in French before playing at the Stratford Festival in 2014. (He also penned the screenplay to Mika Kaurismäki’s biographical drama The Girl King, released the year after.)
Christina, here named Christine, is best known for the gender antics of her youth, but La Reine-garçon only lends a couple minutes to that arc, instead tracing her reign’s final few years (in French, with bilingual surtitles). But even at this juncture, a jarring dissonance exists between society’s expectations for Christine (Kirsten MacKinnon) and how she lives — multiple men seek her hand, but she’s in love with Countess Ebba (Queen Hezumuryango), her lady-in-waiting. Although a suite of philosophical and political ideas waft down for optional engagement (Owen McCausland plays the aforementioned Descartes, who instructs Christine in notions of free will), a story of yearning lies at this blizzard’s centre.
La Reine-garçon prances through its intermission-inclusive two hours and 45 minutes, traversing from location to location with efficiency. While this fleet-footed approach is entertaining, it did leave me occasionally confused about key plot points. Absent opera’s tendency to repeat information more than once, I at times had difficulty keeping track of the three grouchy men dressed in edgy black furs (period-accurate costume design by Sébastien Dionne); my seatmate encountered the same issue.
Bilodeau’s score is classical in intention, but with plenty of contemporary colouring. Offstage singer Anne-Marie Beaudette performs a high-pitched motif inspired by the kulning, an ancestral Scandinavian women’s chant, and MacKinnon joins her in the vocal stratosphere, driving the action with an agile but full soprano. Playing the smarmy Count Johan, Isaiah Bell puts his gleaming tenor to comedic work, repeating the onomatopoeic phrase “Click! Clack!” so often that the surtitles stop bothering. Conductor Johannes Debus collaborates with the COC Orchestra and chorus master Sandra Horst to ensure climaxes arrive with majestic force.
Except for the staging of Descartes’ lecture, which draws inspiration from Rembrandt’s “Anatomy Lesson,” director Angela Konrad’s chosen visual language is snow, snow, and more snow. The first scene proves characteristic: While Siminovitch-winning set designer Anick La Bissonnière fills the playing space with towering tree trunks, projection designer Alexandre Desjardins conjures a snowstorm at the rear of the stage, as well as on a downstage scrim. This three-dimensional effect contributes to the opera’s distinctive opening image of a Swedish army huddling for warmth.
Projections continue to provide backdrops, with scenery flying in and out as needed. La Bissonnière, Desjardins, and lighting designer Éric Champoux render Christine’s castle in a particularly expressionistic fashion, facilitating an excellent sequence involving a group of dancing stags who Christine might be dreaming… and who maybe aren’t actually animals at all? With the playing space so sparse and neutral, the possibilities are numerous.
La Reine-garçon represents a delicious chance to see a new opera performed at sweeping scale. And I think there may be a subtextual reason that Canadian artists and audiences gravitate toward Christine’s story: As she stands in front of a projected sheet of ice and sings of love for her nation, the arctic landscape seeming to expand for kilometers, I found it disarmingly easy to forget she means Sweden, and not here.
La Reine-garçon runs at the Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts until February 15. Tickets are available here.
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