Arts & Culture

What: The Wolf in the Voice
Where: Tarragon Theatre, 30 Bridgman Ave.
When: Now, until Wed., Feb. 26
Highlight: Rebecca Picherack’s lighting design adding striking visuals to this auditory experience
Rating: NNN (out of 5)
Why you should go: Extraordinary singing from a wonderful trio of performers

THE POETIC TITLE of Tarragon and Nightswimming Theatre’s latest collaboration (The Wolf in the Voice) may be an unfamiliar term, but it’s a concept that most singers probably know well, even if not by name. It refers to a disruption, or “break,” that vocalists encounter when trying to shift from their chest voice to their head voice. Grappling with this phenomenon, three exquisite singers (Neema Bickersteth, Jane Miller and Taurian Teelucksingh) perform a cappella songs and autobiographical reflections alongside a string of metacognitive commentaries that try to hold the audience’s hand through understanding precisely what it is they’re watching.

Co-created by Martin Julien and Brian Quirt (with obvious creative input from the performers in a rigorous devising process), this is a difficult piece to categorize. It doesn’t contain enough of a narrative throughline to feel much like a play, though there’s a bit too much narrative structure to feel quite like concert instead. It may contain frequent standards from the musical theatre songbook, but it’s definitely not a traditional musical. At times, it even feels like a seminar. The best way that I could describe it is as a dramaturgical experiment, which makes a lot of sense when it’s the product of a dramaturgy-focused company like Nightswimming and co-led by someone best known for being a dramaturg like Quirt.

So, if it’s an experiment, what exactly are they testing? There’s a line relatively early in the show that the cast (appropriately speaking in unison) explicitly frames as a hypothesis: that a group singing together can lose sight of where one voice/person ends and the others begin. From the audience’s perspective, it’s not always clear how the performance we’re watching may prompt us to contemplate or untangle this fascinating provocation, but there can be little doubt that it fuelled the creative team while they structured the musical arrangements and decided upon the piece’s overall shape.

Trying to discuss each of the three performers individually may run counter to that stated goal. Suffice it to say, they are all incredible at their craft. Hearing them do what they do best across an eclectic revue of pop hits, show tunes and operatic arias is the number one reason to attend this show. They counterbalance their virtuosic talents with vulnerable storytelling, detailed descriptions of their vocal fitness regimens and real-time struggles to tame the wolf, all serving to engender a touchingly humanizing quality.

Even though this is predominantly an auditory experience, Rebecca Picherack’s lighting design pulls its weight to make the piece’s visuals equally compelling. The lights pulse in rhythm with the songs and feature eye-catching colour motifs to accompany recurring concepts. Particularly striking is an ominous deep blue that overwhelms the stage whenever the titular lupine rears its head.

Also designed by Picherack, the largely bare set’s most exciting component is a Big-inspired piano design carved into the floor for the performers to walk across in a very direct homage. However, unlike its cinematic counterpart, it is not a functional keyboard, relying on strategic lighting effects and the singers’ vocalization to work in conjunction with their precisely timed footing. The result is delightful, though I’d be remiss if I didn’t note the floorboards’ general creakiness, occasionally impeding the show’s otherwise finely tuned acoustic landscape. Perhaps, like the wolves in the singers’ voices, these audible intrusions represent the material world’s imposition upon a masterful singer’s desire to have total control over the sounds they produce — though Occam’s razor would suggest that this meaning was likely unintentional.

Even at only 90 minutes in length, I’ll admit that I personally found the piece to drag from time to time. I had a bit of a hard time getting a handle on where any of it was going, lacking the kinds of structural guideposts that might have instilled more confidence that it actually was all heading somewhere satisfying. I half expected it to end with them turning to the audience and saying, “So, what did we learn today?” That thankfully didn’t happen, but the concluding song ultimately didn’t seem any more finalizing than any of the ones that came before it. If not for its stellar production design, The Wolf in the Voice would feel more like sitting in on a rehearsal for a work-in-progress than witnessing the ripened fruits of the team’s experimental labour. Maybe that’s the point, but your mileage will vary as to how engaging that is to you. If nothing else, see it for the singers; they will not fail to get your toes tapping.