The Martlet

When I first enter the 10 000-square foot opera shop on Discovery Street where Pacific Opera Victoria (POV) builds its productions, I am struck by the emptiness of the front room. POV is the only opera company in Canada that builds sets from scratch for every opera it produces. I’d expected every square inch of the shop to be bristling with Valkyrie costumes and Viking helmets from past shows. Instead, a few employees eat lunch at a sparse table. A single piece of paper is pinned to a large bulletin board. On the paper is a picture of a tree that’s fallen and crushed a house. Under the picture are the words, “I’m a lumberjack and I’m — oh, shit.”

That sentiment is not unfamiliar to POV. The last time the company produced a commissioned opera — 11 years ago — the opera flopped, not unlike the tree in the picture. But this time, the production team is certain it has picked a winner. Mary’s Wedding was originally a play by Albertan Stephen Massicotte, written for two actors and a bare stage. It has been produced all over the world since 2002. Massicotte has said of his play, “The words are the set.” Still, he agreed to write the libretto for POV’s operatic version, which calls for three main characters, a 20-member chorus and over $450 000 in production costs. He must be aware that in this version, which premiered on Nov. 10 at McPherson Playhouse and runs until Nov. 20, the set is composed of more than words.

Production manager and UVic theatre alumna Ereca Hassell and Ian Rye, the designer for Mary’s Wedding, retrieve me from the break room and its masticating crew members. Rye tells me the opera is a love story set in the First World War. It enacts the dream that a woman named Mary has the night before her wedding, but it’s not her fiancée she’s dreaming of. It’s her first love, Charlie — the love she lost in the war. So although play leaps geographically from her farm to the trenches in France, Rye has opted to keep all the action “in Mary’s backyard.” After all, it’s her head we’re in.

Rye leads me into the largest room in the opera shop. Gentle hills of chestnut-coloured wood along one wall form the beginnings of the set for Mary’s Wedding. Planks line the wall behind us. The farthest wall is a series of garage doors where the gaping maw of a trailer waits, ready to ingest props that must be transported to POV’s rehearsal space. The fourth wall holds props saved from previous productions: gilded, overturned tables and chairs; a murky globe; a pennant with a penitent-looking Jesus on the cross; a cog.

Rye points to a rendering of the finished Mary’s Wedding set that’s been taped to a table inthe middle of the room. The depicted backdrop is a prairie sky whose soft watercolours muddy in one corner, turning to dark storm clouds.

“That’s World War One on the horizon,” says Rye as he stands in the shadow of an enormous, pock-marked, propped-up moon. All of the larger set pieces are built in sections so that they can be taken apart, loaded into a trailer and re-assembled at the McPherson Theatre.

It’s been 12 years since the POV has performed at the McPherson; prior to its move to the Royal Theatre, though, it had been producing operas at the McPherson for 15 years. For a small-scale chamber opera like Mary’s Wedding, the McPherson will be the perfect fit.

“Want to go visit Costuming upstairs?” asks Rye.

THE WHITE DRESS

Rye calls the costume aesthetic for Mary’s Wedding “prairie romantic.” The white-walled, brightly lit workshop buzzes with women, some hand-sewing details onto costumes. One woman cuts and pastes photographs of period-appropriate haircuts onto a piece of manilla paper. Rye explains that they will assign different haircuts to different male performers. He points to one photo of a man whose hair bristles up and away from his forehead. This is a photo of the real Lieutenant Gordon Flowerdew, the only non-fictitious character in Mary’s Wedding (despite having the most unlikely name). Rye says the actor playing Flowerdew bears a remarkable resemblance to the actual man, who won the Victoria Cross for leading the cavalry charge at the Battle of Moreuil Wood.

“Sometimes happy accidents occur,” says Rye.

Still, in costuming, nothing is left to chance and every detail is researched. Even the insignia for Lord Strathcona’s Horse regiment, the regiment that Flowerdew and Mary’s lover belong to, is accurate. Costume designs are drafted nine months before the production opens, and the fitting process begins six weeks before, starting with local chorus members. Because principal singers are often from out of town, their fittings begin three weeks before production. They must each be fitted three times to ensure a perfect fit. The fabric used for these costumes is either sourced in Vancouver or purchased online and dyed. In fact, the head of wardrobe spends so much time sourcing fabric that she hardly constructs any of the costumes herself.

The result is endless rolling racks of military garb and raw linen blouses. Garments sport handwritten tags bearing each singer’s name. The onstage effect, says Rye, is cinematic.

“You don’t do that by just grabbing stuff off the shelves,” he says.

We find Sandra McLellan, head of wardrobe, heaving boxes full of shoes onto shelves in a small back room.

“I bet you I have fit shoes on more people than anyone in Victoria,” says McLellan. She’s done 50 operas and worked at POV for 20 years. “I’m just actually putting away all the footwear from [The Flying] Dutchman because there were 60 chorus members.” The Flying Dutchman was POV’s last production — an old Wagnerian opera sung in German that’s a far cry from a new Canadian opera sung in English.

McLellan takes me from the room of boots to a room of floor-to-ceiling costumes. Even with all the space, she still can’t save every costume. Some she takes apart and reuses. “We wouldn’t destroy something to end up with nothing,” she says. “The average diva dress — that’s kind of an oxymoron, isn’t it? — takes about 120 hours to make.” She keeps those ones.

Mary’s dress is far from diva-esque. It’s a nightgown. Even so, the lace trim is made of two types of lace that have been painstakingly sewn together. “In the props department, there are so many advances with material they can use to create things — you know, laser cutting of something for the set,” says McLellan. “Wardrobe? It hasn’t changed. It’s still needle and thread. We are intimate with the performers.”

McLellan graduated from UVic’s theatre department and still occasionally goes back to borrow or loan costumes. Some of the professors and staff from her days at UVic are still there.

“When I go up there, it’s like they’re just . . . wearing different clothes, these kids. They’re just hanging out in the halls. It’s the same dynamic. Only they’re now looking at me like I’m an old lady.”

McLellan says that labour costs within wardrobe are typically the greatest costs associated with any production. The work is intense up until opening night. And then?

“We step back and collapse,” says McLellan. “We take a long weekend. We go for lunch.” But does she ever celebrate by exploiting the giant dress-up closet that we’re standing in?

“I never get the urge to try the costumes on,” says McLellan. “The only time I get vaguely excited is when all the chorus women are nuns. They look so cute in their little headdresses!”

THE WHITE BED

Downstairs again, I find two women working in the prop department. They don’t look up from their drills and pins when we’re introduced.

“We have to be out of here in seven minutes,” says Maureen Mackintosh, head of props, as she sews sheets onto a white wrought iron bed. The actors jump on the bed, she explains, and the sheets must stay in place. In props, she says, “We do 212 different things — something like that. It’s all in the job description.” Mackintosh has been at POV for 28 years. “We’re lifers,” she says of most of the department heads.

Near the work bench that runs down the centre of the room like a banquet table, blue and white striped drawers are labeled “Kite String,” “Jute Twine” and “White Twine.” Atop the cupboards that line one wall, an owl perches next to candelabra, lanterns and a miniature chaise lounge.

Behind Mackintosh’s workspace, a storage room boasts an even more anachronistic array of accessories. A silver, rococo clock festooned with birds languishes among colanders and courier bags. Mackintosh says the clock was originally her own. “I’ve rearranged my house so there’s no place for it. If you go around the corner there’s a hookah pipe, and it’s just a series of vases.”

Kitty-corner from the props room and across the massive construction hall I first visited, Derek Hawksley, the head carpenter, sits in his office with his blueprints.

“Mary’s Wedding has what you’d call compound curves,” he says. “It has curves on the horizontal and curves on the vertical plane, and they meet. It’s not the most complex thing, but it’s a little difficult. Every show has its own difficulties.”

One of those difficulties can be overly-ambitious set designers.

“A lot of designers aren’t engineers, so they have a vision, and they’re able to draw something in two dimensions if they want, but making that a reality in three dimensions that will hold 30 people can be a big challenge,” Hawksley says. Near the door of his office, a diorama of an imagined set teeters on a filing cabinet. The tiny room has black walls. A thumbnail-sized print of Queen Elizabeth in a spangled gossamer collar stares at me with pinprick-sized pupils.

On the day they take a set to the theatre, Hawksley and his team have only 10 hours to set up.

“Anything after that happens in the dark,” he says, because “the electricians are doing lighting levels.” At a theatre like the Belfry, a production company can build sets right on the stage over a matter of days and the cast can rehearse with those sets. POV, in stark contrast, holds the bulk of its rehearsals in a large church hall on Balmoral Street with only a few essential props and costume elements.

When I visit a rehearsal a few days later, the bed with the sewn-on sheets is front and centre on the hardwood floor that’s covered in gymnasium stripes. Female chorus members wear their assigned skirts, some with the name tags still attached. They are a wash of cornflower blues and muted peaches. They wear their own shirts.

There’s some fumbling at the beginning as male chorus members load Flowerdew onto a stretcher. As the rehearsal unfolds, the props come into the spotlight as much as the principals: wooden carts wind their way across the stage, gunnysacks flop to the floor and helmets glint. A long, white swath of material trails across the floor when the chorus sings about blood on snow. During a break, Mary’s lover practises firing his gun and thrusting his sword while the rest of the cast enjoys tea and cookies.

When the rehearsal ends, the director asks the chorus women, “Can you wave your handkerchief that way” — he waves his hand side to side — “not that way?” — he waves his forward and backward. They nod and clutch those little squares of fabric — those fluttering props that tell the audience that the troops are leaving. The First World War has begun.

You can read Vanessa Annand’s review of the finished production of Mary’s Wedding online at martlet.ca