Starting Saturday evening, the Opéra de Québec presents The bat by Johann Strauss fils for four performances in a production that Jean-François Lapointe, the director of the institution, wanted to be entirely Quebecois, through its creators, its artisans and all the artists.
It was Bertrand Alain that Jean-François Lapointe appealed for this Bat Québécois song sung in French and adapted by Alain from the French version by Meilhac and Halévy, “so that the spoken scenes are more direct and the humor more effective”. “As is often done in operettas, we add topical subjects,” announces the director to the Duty.
“Pow!” » and “zap!” »
The actor, theater and opera director, teacher at the lyrical workshop of the Conservatory of Music and Dramatic Art of Quebec, who had directed Don Giovanni in 2022, there is no shortage of ideas, and we suspected that the Vienna of the last quarter of the 19the century (the work, which embodies the Viennese operetta in itself, dates from 1874) would not necessarily be his working framework. “I saw a lot of productions and I didn’t have an image; I didn’t really remember why [ça s’appelait] The bat. So that struck me as a striking image. That’s where I had the idea of Batman, the Batman of my early childhood, the one from the television series from the sixties, closer to the comic strip. »
The story of The bat is that of revenge, that of a man named Falke, whom his friend Eisenstein once ridiculed by forcing him to wander around Vienna in a bat costume. The action takes place when Eisenstein was sentenced to spend eight days in prison. Falke arrives and offers him a little preliminary detour: the party of Prince Orlofsky, a bored dandy. The plan being well hatched, Eisenstein’s wife, Rosalind, will be at this party, disguised as a Hungarian countess; the couple’s maid, who poses as an actress, and the prison director, who sees nothing but fire, since at Eisenstein’s home he has, by mistake, taken Alfred, Rosalinde’s suitor, with him , dressed in the dressing gown of the master of the house. The party is a festival of pretense and, when the reckoning comes (Act III, at the prison), all these beautiful liars will have an excuse: too much champagne!
SO, The bat in 2024? As Bertrand Alain writes in the opera program: “How can I bring this superhero from my childhood (the one from the 1960s TV series with its pow!his boom! and his zap!) in this 19th century plote century ? » This is where Alain noticed that Meilhac and Halevy’s adaptation was set at the time of the Universal Exhibition in Paris.
New colors
“I began to imagine that this could happen at Expo 67, in Quebec, a very strong memory for the people here, the awakening of Quebec, its opening to the world,” Bertrand Alain tells us. This era “barely precedes Sisters-in-law by Michel Tremblay, who would completely change the theater; we are at the beginning of a new time, as Stéphane Venne says in Renée Claude’s song. I went back to that time and reworked the text, including the score, to change the humor that we no longer understand today. The operetta suffers badly from the museological side”, analyzes the director and adapter who promises that his show “will leave strong images with the spectators”.
Knowing that the bat is in the title more than in the action, a “Batmanian” prologue will introduce Falke’s humiliation and color the show. The era of the 1960s will be reflected in the sets, costumes and lighting. “The strong image of this era is this optimism. The world could change. Even the architecture of the Expo pavilions was an inspiration for the decorations. And in terms of costumes, in colors and cuts, clothing changed a lot in those years,” Bertrand Alain tells us, who wanted Prince Orlofsky’s ball not to be weighed down by “the allusions to the little dancers who will do the splits for these gentlemen.” “Our ball will be under the colors of cinema,” he warns.
On the music side, nothing to fear: the work is cooked to perfection with a fireworks display of melodies, each one more beautiful than the other and an orchestration of perfect efficiency. In the pit, Nicolas Ellis should take great pleasure in conducting his first operatic work in Quebec.