Stage/Theatre

What: Medea
Where: Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts, 145 Queen St. W.
When: Now, until Fri., May. 17
Highlight: Reality-bending set conceived by director David McVicar.
Rating: NNNN (out of 5)
Why you should go: Herculean role of Medea pulled off with ferocity and grace.

THE FACE of a young woman in shades of blue contorts into what seems to be yearning, surprise and horror. That’s the painting on the curtain that stares the audience down as they enter Director David McVicar’s Medea. It’s haunting, as the first ominous chords of the overture play, the curtain begins to rise, revealing the two-hour and 35-minute epic by Luigi Cherubini.

The rarely produced Medea is a co-production of The Metropolitan Opera and Canadian Opera Company, based on the Greek tragedy of the same name by Euripides. The sorceress Medea helps Jason (or in Italian, Giasone), leader of the Argonauts to steal the Golden Fleece: they fall in love, have children and Medea is consequently abandoned by him. The action of the opera begins on the day of Giasone’s wedding to Glauce, daughter of King Creon. In fear of complete isolation from society and her own children, Medea will do whatever necessary to enact revenge. Beware a woman scorned.

The role of Medea is widely renowned to be “one of the most challenging roles in opera history” in a combination of the emotional marathon the role demands, music that reaches the top of the soprano range and the fact that she is on stage for pretty much the whole show. Sondra Radvanovsky does not rise but gracefully levitates to the challenge, leaving no surprise as to why she’s considered one of the prima sopranos in the opera world today. She is a powerhouse of raw emotion, matching beautiful soprano melodic lines with yearning and pain. Radvanovsky is extensively in tune with the softer human parts of Medea that simply want to be loved and her capability for destruction: perhaps things that go hand in hand. The rest of the chorus matches her artistic merit in their supporting roles; Glauce (Janai Brugger) is particularly pleasing to the ear with a gorgeous, light soprano.

Every artistic design was of the highest calibre. The orchestra is a dream, a beautiful heartbeat that propels this masterpiece. Doey Luthi’s costumes of the people of King Creon are intricate, technicolour and royal, further isolating Medea in her all-black dress. Lighting by Paule Constable and projections by S. Katy Tucker elevate the exquisite visual design already on stage through shadows, and, eventually, jaw-dropping representations of fire.

McVicar’s set (developed during his COVID-19 quarantine) is a stroke of visual genius. As the curtain first rises, the gigantic city walls of King Creon’s city are revealed. They’re golden-plated, beautifully combining yellows and blues and are at least 12 feet tall. Eventually, once we’re let into his city, the crowning jewel of the set is revealed: a mirror.

The backdrop of the stage is a gigantic mirror, angled down onto the stage so that it provides a live overhead view for the audience of the action that happens onstage: a bird’s-eye view. This opens up a whole new world of visual delight for the audience — McVicar is able to paint two pictures at the same time. Action that might be lost in more upstage movements is now perfectly on display with this mirror technique. It creates beautiful images, such as the trail of a multiple-foot wedding dress, or a candlelit dinner gleaming upwards on the mirrored wall, creating a reality-bending effect that allows us to get multiple points of view on the action as it happens.

This tragedy clocking in at almost three hours Medea feels its length, as such emotionally intense material can feel exhausting, especially in Act II.

Act III, however, makes this marathon of a performance incredibly cathartic. Its infamous bloody ending is an absolutely awe-inducing culmination of raw human emotion and visual destruction that could be achieved through no other medium than opera. COC’s Medea is a once-in-a-lifetime spectacle of this rarely-produced opera, realized to its fullest artistic extent.