How To Live and Die at the Canadian Opera Company: Roméo et Juliette and Orfeo ed Euridice in Toronto

Stephen Costello and Kseniia Proshina in Roméo et Juliette. (Photo: Michael Cooper.)

The Canadian Opera Company’s 2025–26 season opens with a stylistically mismatched pairing: Roméo et Juliette, Charles Gounod’s 1867 Shakespeare-inspired opera in director Amy Lane’s over-extravagant Malmö Opera rental, and the revival of Canadian director Robert Carsen’s minimalist 2011 staging of Orfeo ed Euridice, Christoph Willibald Gluck’s 1762 rendering of the Greek myth. The two productions run in rotation at Toronto’s Four Seasons Centre through to the end of this month.

Narratively, the operas share a thematic core: each revolves around a couple torn apart by death. Both explore self-restraint versus unbridled passion, promises kept and broken, truths concealed, and victimization—redemption, in the case of this revisionist Orfeo—by forces beyond the protagonists’ control.

The programming logic is evident: Gounod’s late French Romanticism contrasted with Gluck’s formal Baroque structures offers a study in opposites. Yet in performance, the balance shifts so sharply that Carsen’s pitch-perfect Orfeo exposes Roméo et Juliette as a misjudged choice for a season opener.

Lane’s interpretation of the Gounod original alienates as much as it perplexes. The first‑act Capulet ball morphs into a bloated circus‑themed affair, diverting focus from the love story; Roméo appears as a buttoned-up accountant; Count Capulet in drag. These choices drain the tragedy of gravitas, tipping it into unintentional farce.

Iestyn Davies and Anna-Sophie Nether (at center) and the chorus of Orfeo ed Euridice. (Photo: Michael Cooper.)

Carsen’s Orfeo, a co-production with Lyric Opera of Chicago, the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, Opéra Royal Château de Versailles Spectacles, and Fondazione Teatro dell’Opera di Roma, achieves the opposite effect. Tobias Hoheisel’s stripped-down set is a high artistic accomplishment: a lunar expanse of grey dirt and stone, with a dimly lit underworld where furies lie like corpses until jolting to life to sing sideways. The grainy palette, including stark black costumes reminiscent of a Sicilian funeral procession, underscores the bracing originality of Carsen’s vision. Here, the myth becomes not only a meditation on mortality but also a celebration of imagination’s power through art.

Gluck’s reformist spirit animates the work, privileging truthful storytelling over decorative stagecraft and vocal display. In his notes, Carsen cites “a return to a simple and direct expression of essential human emotion” as the opera’s beating heart. Nearly three centuries on, Orfeo speaks plainly to its audience, weaving a psychologically rich narrative of loss and resurrection. Unlike Ovid’s tragic ending, Calzabigi’s libretto resolves joyfully: Amore, god of love, intervenes to restore Euridice permanently, forestalling Orfeo’s grief. Carsen tempers the surprise with a folk-dance finale, Orfeo and Euridice aloft on chairs as though at a modest wedding.

The scene’s quiet power rests on the discipline of the COC chorus under chorus master Sandra Horst and the dignity of the orchestra led by conductor Bernard Labadie. The lead trio—countertenor Iestyn Davies as a poignant Orfeo, Anna-Sophie Nether as a clear-voiced if not always clear-thinking Euridice, and Catherine St-Arnaud as a sprightly, shape-shifting Amore—elevates the revival into something memorable.

The COC chorus and orchestra again deliver polished ensemble work for Roméo et Juliette, this time conducted by Yves Abel. Most notably, it is the singing that rescues the production from near disaster: Kseniia Proshina’s crystalline Juliette rises above the lack of chemistry with Stephen Costello’s Roméo. A Metropolitan Opera favourite lauded for his dramatic lyricism, Costello has performed the role elsewhere to acclaim, but here Lane’s staging straitjackets him, substituting production excess for the human touch—precisely the imbalance Gluck set out to reform.

The director appears to have banked on audiences filling in emotional gaps from their own familiarity with Shakespeare’s star-crossed lovers. What she did not anticipate was their unwillingness to overlook the flaws. May this Roméo et Juliette rest in peace.

– Deirdre Kelly is a Toronto-based journalist, author and internationally recognized dance critic and style writer on staff at The Globe and Mail newspaper from 1985 to 2017. She writes for Dance Magazine in New York, the Dance Gazette in London, and NUVO in Vancouver, and is a contributor to the International Dictionary of Ballet and AWOL: Tales for Travel-Inspired Minds. The best-selling author of Paris Times Eight and Ballerina: Sex, Scandal and Suffering Behind the Symbol of Perfection, she is a two-time recipient (2020 and 2014) of Canada’s Nathan Cohen Prize for outstanding critical writing. In 2017, she joined York University as Editor of the award-winning The York University Magazine where she is also the publication’s principal writer. In 2023, she published her latest book, Fashioning The Beatles: The Looks That Shook The World.